Duke Ellington Studies

Duke Ellington Studies
Duke Ellington (1899–1974) is widely considered the jazz tradi-

tion’s most celebrated composer. This engaging yet scholarly volume
explores his long career and his rich cultural legacy from a broad
range of in-depth perspectives, from the musical and historical to
the political and international. World-renowned scholars and musi-
cians examine Ellington’s influence on jazz music, its criticism, and
its historiography. The chronological structure of the volume allows
a clear understanding of the development of key themes, with chap-
ters surveying his work and his reception in America and abroad.
By both expanding and reconsidering the contexts in which Elling-
ton, his orchestra, and his music are discussed, Duke Ellington Studies
reflects a wealth of new directions that have emerged in Jazz Studies,
including focuses on music in media, class hierarchy discourse, glob-
alization, cross-cultural reception, and the role of marketing, as well
as manuscript score studies and performance studies.
john howland is Professor of Music History at the Norwegian

University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, and for-
merly an associate professor of Musicology, Jazz Studies, and American
Studies at Rutgers University–Newark. He is the co-founder and for-
mer editor of the journal Jazz Perspectives, as well as the author of
Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of
Concert Jazz (2009).
Duke Ellington Studies
Edited by john howland

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DOI: 10.1017/9781139028226

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A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

Names: Howland, John, 1964–
Title: Duke Ellington studies / edited by John Howland.
Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2017. |
Series: Cambridge composer studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017003311 | ISBN 9780521764049 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Ellington, Duke, 1899-1974 – Criticism and interpretation. |
Jazz – History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML410.E44 D86 2017 | DDC 781.65092–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003311
ISBN 978-0-521-76404-9 Hardback
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and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Illustrations page [vii]

Notes on Contributors [xi]
Preface [xv]
Acknowledgements [xxi]
Note on Reference Abbreviations [xxiii]
1 Ellington the Entertainer: Pageantry and Prophecy in

Duke Ellington’s Films [1]
phil ford
2 Marketing to the Middlebrow: Reconsidering Ellingtonia,

the Legacy of Early Ellington Criticism, and the Idea of a
“Serious” Jazz Composer [32]
john howland
3 “Art or Debauchery?”: The Reception of Ellington in the

U.K. [76]
catherine tackley
4 “Nobody Was Looking”: The Unparalleled Jazz Piano

Legacy of Duke Ellington [108]
bill dobbins
5 “People Wrap Their Lunches in Them”: Duke Ellington

and His Written Music Manuscripts [157]
walter van de leur
6 The Moor’s Revenge: The Politics of Such Sweet Thunder [177]

david schiff
7 Duke Ellington in the LP Era [197]

gabriel solis
8 Authentic Synthetic Hybrid: Ellington’s Concepts of Africa

and Its Music [224]
carl woideck
v
vi Contents
9 “The Mother of All Albums”: Revisiting Ellington’s A

Drum Is a Woman [265]
john wriggle
Index [299]
Illustrations
Figures
1.1 Michael Leavitt, MoveOn.org, A Little Green from a Lot of

People (2008) page [8]
1.2 Justin Hampton, That One: History (2008) [9]
1.3 Tableau from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Star of Ethiopia (Crisis,
August 1916) [10]
1.4 Figures from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Star of Ethiopia (Crisis,
December 1915) [10]
1.5 Alec Lovejoy and Edgar Connor, Black and Tan (RKO, 1929) [21]
2.1 The red-velvet cover and accompanying liner-note booklet
to the 1943 Brunswick Records 78-rpm album, Ellingtonia,
vol. 1, B1000 [35]
2.2 The front and back covers of the 1946 78-rpm album, Black,
Brown and Beige, SP-9 (soft cover) [37]
8.1 Duke Ellington and the Senegalese poet, philosopher, and
statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor, April 1966. Ruth Ellington
Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American
History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. [243]
8.2 The Ellington orchestra with Senegalese percussionist Gana
M’bow in Dakar, April 1966. Ruth Ellington Collection,
Archives Center, National Museum of American History,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. [250]
8.3 Duke Ellington welcomed at the airport in Addis Ababa by
Emperor Haile Selassie’s pet lion, Mecuria, in 1974. Courtesy
of Art Baron. Photographer unknown [258]
8.4 The Ellington Orchestra at the Addis Ababa Hilton Hotel on
22 November 1973, with Ethiopian vibraphonist/
keyboardist, Mulatu Astatke [261]
vii
viii List of Illustrations
Examples
All examples in Chapter 4 are transcribed from the recordings by Bill

Dobbins.
4.1 Black Beauty (1 October 1928), A theme, mm. 1–4 [112]
4.2 In a Mellotone (4 May 1940), introduction, mm. 1–3 [119]
4.3 Mr. J. B. Blues (1 October 1940), second blues chorus, mm.
5–8 [121]
4.4 Blue Serge (15 February 1941), last four measures of
Ellington’s solo [123]
4.5 Solitude (14 May 1941, take 2), first chorus, last A section,
mm. 1–4 [124]
4.6 Blue Belles of Harlem (23 January 1943), Ellington’s “bent
note” effect [126]
4.7 New World A-Comin’ (11 December 1943), C theme, mm.
1–4 [128]
4.8 “Dancers in Love” (from the Perfume Suite, 19 December
1944), final A phrase, mm. 1–4 [130]
4.9. “Nobody Was Looking” (from the Deep South Suite, 23
November 1946), A theme, mm. 13–16 [132]
4.10 “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” (from the Deep South Suite, 23
November 1946), first piano solo, mm. 1–4 [133]
4.11 The Clothed Woman (27 December 1947), A section, mm.
1–4 [135]
4.12 “Reflections in D” (14 April 1953), first A section, mm. 1–3 [139]
4.13 “Kinda Dukish” (3 December 1953), 32 measures before the
closing theme [140]
4.14 Band Call (26 April 1954), B section, mm. 5–8 [141]
4.15 Night Creature (16 March 1955), part two, mm. 1–3 [142]
4.16 “The Single Petal of a Rose” (from The Queen’s Suite, 14
April 1959), first A1 section, mm. 5–8 [144]
4.17 Second Portrait of The Lion (20 June 1965), second A section,
mm. 7–10 [147]
4.18 “The Shepherd” (18 July 1966), B theme, mm. 9–11 [148]
4.19 “Ad Lib on Nippon” (20 December 1966), second chorus,
mm. 1–4 [150]
4.20 Mood Indigo, comparison of the A theme, mm. 1–4, with
corresponding Ellington introductions or solos [154]
List of Illustrations ix
9.1A “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2 (Drums Rab)” (1:31ff.) [287]

9.1B “Ballet of the Flying Saucers,” interlude (1:58ff.) [288]
9.2 “Finale” (0:01ff.) [290]
9.3 A (left): “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” (1:45ff.) B (center):
“Carribee Joe Part 1” (2:13ff.) C (right): “Congo Square
(Mme Zajj Entrance)” (3:21ff.) [290]
9.4A “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (2:00ff.) [291]
9.4B “Rhumbop” (0:06ff.) [291]
9.5A “Carribee Joe Part 1” (1:49ff.) [291]
9.5B “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (0:28ff.) [291]
9.5C “Ballet of the Flying Saucers” (1:40ff.) [291]
9.6 “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (1:15ff.) [292]
Tables
6.1 Formal design of “Such Sweet Thunder,” movement 1 from

Such Sweet Thunder [191]
6.2 Formal design of “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead
Them Up and Down),” movement 7 from Such Sweet
Thunder [194]
9.1 A Drum Is a Woman album and telecast sequences [270]
9.2 “Ballet of the Flying Saucers,” formal outline [289]
Contributors
bill dobbins is Professor of Jazz Studies and Contemporary Media at

the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. From 1994 to 2002,
he was Principal Director of the WDR Big Band in Cologne, Germany.
From 1998, he was also Chair of the Jazz Department at the Hochschule
für Musik in Cologne. He has appeared as guest conductor of the Nether-
lands Metropole Orchestra in Hilversum, and has arranged for many of
their concerts and radio productions. As pianist, composer/arranger, and
conductor, he has collaborated with such artists as Clark Terry, Eddie
Henderson, Lew Soloff, Chuck Israels, Red Mitchell, Phil Woods, Dave
Liebman, Jerry Bergonzi, Steve Lacy, Gary Bartz, Gary Foster, and Peter
Erskine. His publications include Jazz Arranging and Composing: A Linear
Approach, A Creative Approach to Jazz Piano Harmony, and Composing
and Arranging for the Contemporary Big Band. His books of piano tran-
scriptions include Chick Corea: Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, and Clare
Fischer: Alone Together/Just Me. His recent CDs include J. S. Bach: Christ-
mas Oratorio, which he arranged and conducted, with the King’s Singers
and the WDR Big Band, and Bill Dobbins: Composers Series, vol. 1, Music
of Clare Fischer and George Gershwin (solo piano).
phil ford is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Indiana University
Jacobs School of Music. He previously taught at the University of Texas
at Austin, where he was a fellow of the University of Texas Humanities
Institute, and at Stanford University, where he was a fellow of the Stanford
Humanities Fellows Program. His published work has focused on postwar
American popular music (especially jazz and film music), American Cold
War culture, radical and countercultural intellectual history, and sound
and performance. Ford is the author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
(Oxford University Press, 2013), a cultural and intellectual history of
hipness in American life from the 1940s through the 1960s. His essays have
appeared in Representations, Journal of Musicology, Jazz Perspectives, The
Musical Quarterly, and other scholarly journals. He is also the co-author
(with Jonathan Bellman) of the musicology blog Dial “M” for Musicology,
which he founded in 2006 and maintains to this day. His current interests
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
revolve around music and philosophy and, more particularly, on magical

styles of thought; at present, he is working on a book on this topic.
john howland, an American ex-pat, is Professor of Music History at the
Department of Music, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
in Trondheim, and lives in Lund, Sweden. He was previously a member
of the Musicology, Jazz History, and American Studies faculties of Rut-
gers University–Newark, and the Musicology faculty of Lund University.
He is the author of Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson,
and the Birth of Concert Jazz (University of Michigan Press, 2009), and
the co-founder and former editor-in-chief of the Routledge journal, Jazz
Perspectives. Howland is currently working on a history of orchestral pop
aesthetics and practice (spanning jazz, popular music, and music in vari-
ous media) from the 1920s to present. He has likewise written extensively
in articles and book chapters – as well as lectured and taught widely –
on a wealth of musical styles and eras, from dance bands in the 1910s to
post-2000 indie rock and hip-hop topics.
Jazz-musicologist walter van de leur is the author of Something to
Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (Oxford University Press, 2002),
which received the 2003 Irving Lowens Book Award for Distinguished
Scholarship from the Society of American Music. He conducted exten-
sive research at the Duke Ellington Collection under two consecutive
Smithsonian Institution Fellowships, in Washington, D.C., and further-
more researched and catalogued Billy Strayhorn’s musical legacy in the
repository of his estate. He has published on Black, Brown and Beige in
The Musical Quarterly (2013), and the Ellington-Strayhorn Collabora-
tion (The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, 2014). His research
for the Dutch Jazz Orchestra has led to six compact discs with hitherto
forgotten works by Strayhorn (one in 1995 and three in 2002), Mary
Lou Williams (2005), and Gerry Mulligan and Gil Evans (2008). Van de
Leur teaches at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and is Professor of
Jazz and Improvised Music at the University of Amsterdam. He served as
Senior Researcher for Rhythm Changes (2010–13, co-funded by the Euro-
pean Community), for which he directed the Jazz and National Identities
Conference in 2011, and the Jazz Beyond Borders Conference in 2014. He is
currently Principal Investigator for CHIME (2015–17; Cultural Heritage
in Improvised Music Festivals in Europe), funded by Heritage Plus.
david schiff is the R. P. Wollenberg Professor of Music at Reed College,
Portland, Oregon. He studied English Literature at Columbia University
Notes on Contributors xiii
and Cambridge University, and studied composition at the Manhattan

School of Music and the Juilliard School. He has written books about
the music of Elliott Carter, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington, and
composed operas, symphonic works, chamber music, and jazz composi-
tions. His jazz compositions have been performed by Regina Carter, David
Taylor, Marty Ehrlich, Larry Karush, and Myra Melford.
gabriel solis is Professor of Music, African American Studies, and
Anthropology at the University of Ilinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the
author of the books Monk’s Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in
the Making (University of California Press, 2008) and Thelonious Monk
Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall (Oxford University Press,
2013), and co-editor (with Bruno Nettl) of the volume, Musical Improvi-
sation: Art, Education, and Society (University of Illinois Press, 2009). His
articles on jazz, rock, pop, indigenous music, and theory in ethnomusic-
ology have appeared in such journals as Ethnomusicology, The Musical
Quarterly, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Critical Sociology, and
Popular Music and Society. His work has been supported by fellowships
and grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Madden Fund, and
the Mellon Foundation, and has received awards from the Association for
Recorded Sound Collections and the Society for Ethnomusicology.
catherine tackley is Professor and Head of Music at the University
of Liverpool, UK. Tackley’s research interests include jazz and popular
music, early and European jazz, recording, jazz-influenced music, and
performance practice. Her monograph on Benny Goodman’s Famous
1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert (Oxford University Press, 2012) was
awarded Jazz Publication of the Year in 2013 by the All-Party Parliamentary
Jazz Appreciation Group. Her first book, The Evolution of Jazz in Britain,
1880–1935 (Ashgate, 2005), was hailed as “the definitive history of jazz in
Britain.” Tackley was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded project “What
Is Black British Jazz?” in 2009–11, resulting in a volume entitled Black
British Jazz: Routes, Ownership and Performance (Ashgate, 2014) which
Tackley also co-edited. From 2012 to 2014 she was Principal Investigator
of the AHRC Research Networking project “Atlantic Sounds: Ships and
Sailortowns” and continues to develop work on music and the sea. Tackley
is a co-editor of the Jazz Research Journal (Equinox), and a member of the
U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College.
carl woideck is an instructor in jazz, rock, and blues music histories
at the University of Oregon, where he began teaching in 1982. Woideck is
xiv Notes on Contributors
also a professional saxophonist and longtime jazz radio broadcaster. He

is author of Charlie Parker: His Music and Life (University of Michigan
Press), and is also author and editor of The John Coltrane Companion
and The Charlie Parker Companion (both Schirmer Books). He has also
written compact disc liner notes extensively for the Verve, Blue Note,
Mosaic, and Prestige labels. Woideck’s research awards include grants
from the University of Oregon, National Endowment for the Humanities,
and the Institute of Jazz Studies. He has presented research papers at
national meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Society
of American Music.
john wriggle is a musicologist, composer, arranger, and performer in
New York City, and his background further includes experiences working
in music publishing, radio broadcasting, and film music editing. He has
taught courses on Duke Ellington, Popular Music, Jazz History, and Jazz
Arranging for John Jay College, Boston University, Rutgers University–
Newark’s graduate Jazz History and Research program, and Jazz at Lincoln
Center. His research has appeared in Black Music Research Journal, Grove
Dictionary of American Music, and Journal of the Society for American
Music; he is author of the book Blue Rhythm Fantasy: Big Band Jazz
Arranging in the Swing Era (University of Illinois Press, 2016).
Preface
The steady stream of trade publications, critical attention, and perfor-

mances that both preceded and followed the 1999 centennial of Duke
Ellington’s birth has shown few signs of abating up to present. Indeed,
the last decade has witnessed a significant number of monograph stud-
ies, biographies, and academic journal issues devoted to Ellington. The
bandleader/composer’s legacy has continued to remain absolutely central
to scholarly jazz research, a subject area that has become a major field of
international interest across an impressive variety of academic disciplines
since the early 1990s. Beyond its role as a subject in musicology, ethno-
musicology, and music theory, the jazz tradition and its representations in
popular culture have stimulated vibrant new scholarly discourses in such
fields as Comparative Literature, African American Studies, American
Studies, History, Sociology, Gender Studies, and Film Studies. Significant
Ellington-related research can be found in each of these fields. This unusu-
ally broad scholarly interest in Ellington is a reflection of his status as a
composer, his rich role as an historical figure, and his central historical
importance both to the cultural elevation of jazz across the twentieth
century and to jazz criticism and historiography.
In 2015, Cambridge University Press published the Cambridge Com-
panion to Duke Ellington, edited by Edward Green. The present volume
was in fact originally planned as a companion to the Companion, and it
too had its early roots in Green’s inspiration and his preliminary con-
versations with the Press. The volume began in earnest as a partnership,
however, and it took much of its present shape under the joint guidance
of both Green and myself.
Because of the unparalleled role that Ellington’s compositions have
played in the entry of Jazz Studies into the Academy, this volume rep-
resents an important step toward extending the cultural breadth of the
venerable Cambridge Composer Studies series to include major com-
posers from the fields of jazz and popular music. By both expanding and
reconsidering the contexts in which Ellington, his orchestra, and his music
are discussed, Ellington Studies reflects the wealth of new directions that
have emerged in Jazz Studies. At the same time, this collection equally xv
xvi Preface
speaks to non-specialists in jazz historiography, as it provides an ideal

forum for bridging new scholarly directions in Jazz Studies with broader
cross-disciplinary issues in historical inquiry, music analysis, and cultural
studies. The volume as a whole spans nearly the entire breadth of Elling-
ton’s career, from his rise to international prominence in the late 1920s and
early 1930s, to his fascinating but largely overlooked postwar career up
through the 1960s. The contributors’ essays range widely in their concerns
across interdisciplinary perspectives on jazz as music and jazz as culture.
The chapters explore critical reception, the compositional process, cul-
tural politics, American and British class hierarchies, jazz performance
practice, period racial discourses, international cultural exchange, the
intersections of music, culture, and media, and other rich topics. In pro-
gressing through these chronologically organized essays, the reader will be
introduced to both a variety of critical perspectives on Ellington, as well
as an equally diverse range of methodologies and frames of reference for
studying Ellington and the jazz tradition. Beyond its loose chronological
ordering, Duke Ellington Studies is also structured through four important
thematic areas.
The first organizing theme concerns Ellington’s relation to art and
entertainment discourse, and while this theme can be seen across numer-
ous essays in the volume, chapters 1 and 2 in specific explore this con-
cern via the relation between Ellington’s image and his critical reception
and promotional publicity. While Phil Ford explores the intersections of
Ellington’s early career, racial uplift discourses, the modes of meaning
in entertainment and spectacle, and the powerful medium of film, John
Howland offers a parallel study of both class-hierarchy politics in music
and the 1930s creation of Ellington’s unique image as a “serious” jazz
composer, as well as the relation of this image to interwar middlebrow
discourse.
In the volume’s first chapter, Ford observes both how Ellington often
strove to “give an American audience entertainment without compro-
mising the dignity of the Negro people” and how the tension between
entertainment and racial dignity remained unresolved and is especially
marked in Ellington’s film appearances. As Ford demonstrates, “enter-
tainment” comprises codes of historically locatable professional practice
aimed at eliciting familiar responses from paying customers; it entails a
repertory of picturesque scenes and characterizations that are instantly
apprehended and understood. Under this view, it can be seen that enter-
tainment comprises a syntax built on the endless varied repetition of a
particular kind of sign – the sign for a character that is actually the same
Preface xvii
as the character. This syntax of “instant character” is almost unavoidably

racist, or at least racially essentializing. Ford maintains that many black
characters represented in interwar film entertainments did not get to have
personalities or stories, but only stereotypes; Ellington’s answer was not
to do away with entertainment, but to give black characters better stereo-
types. As Ford richly illustrates, these are drawn from an idealized and
mythic history of the African American people, presented as a pageant.
In this manner of representation, history is the solvent of the congealed
sign – even as history itself covertly becomes yet another congealed sign.
In Ellington’s films, the entire span of racial development is recapitulated
in the single, spectacular figure of the suffering, laboring, or performing
black body.
In Chapter 2, Howland examines the relationship among Duke Elling-
ton’s professional image, the promotional agenda of his publicity agents
and managers, interwar symphonic jazz, and Ellington’s critical reception
in the press and subsequent jazz historiography. Through this nexus, this
chapter specifically explores the emergence of the sophisticated public
persona of Duke Ellington, particularly his unique image as a “serious”
jazz composer across the 1930s and early 1940s, but also the relation of
this image to subsequent Ellington discourse. In the context of middle-
brow class-hierarchy discourses across the interwar era, American and
European critics began to regularly place Ellington’s name in the heady
highbrow company of classical composers such as Stravinsky, Delius, and
Debussy, among others. This chapter considers the personal, musical, and
career impact of these classical/vernacular comparisons and how they may
have ultimately led to the composer’s rejection of the term “jazz” after the
early 1940s. Beyond the fascinating role of the innovative public relations
campaigns that promoted Ellington and his music, this image was equally
entwined with contemporary critical efforts that found Ellington’s music
to be an exemplar par excellence for promoting a subversive agenda that
sought to advance and culturally elevate both the idea of “jazz composi-
tion” and black jazz aesthetics in general.
A second organizing theme in the volume concerns Ellington’s presence
on the international stage, both in terms of his reception and cultural
impact, as well as the impact of this international presence on his own
creative work. This theme is centrally the focus of chapters 3 and 8, by
Catherine Tackley and Carl Woideck, respectively. Tackley explores the
impact of Duke Ellington in the U.K., focusing on his 1933 tour of the
country, his 1948 appearances without his orchestra, his performances at
the Royal Festival Hall and the Leeds Festival in 1958, and, finally, the
xviii Preface
three Sacred Concerts which were staged in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.
These performances, which span Ellington’s career, took place in a range
of performance situations and across different regions of the U.K. This
chapter specifically explores the British reception of Ellington’s developing
musical style and his influence on the British jazz community during this
forty-year period. A range of sources – including reviews from local and
national papers together with oral history material – are used to gauge the
reaction of critics and audiences.
Carl Woideck’s contribution, Chapter 8, takes its inspiration from
Ellington’s late-life reflections on his first trip to Africa, upon which he
wrote: “After writing African music for thirty-five years, here I am at last
in Africa! I can only hope and wish that our performance of ‘La Plus
Belle Africaine,’ which I have written in anticipation of the occasion, will
mean something to the people gathered here.” In turn, Woideck asks: if
Ellington was a composer of African (not African American) music, what
did Africa mean to him? As the chapter documents, Ellington’s concepts
of Africa began with his youth in Washington, D.C., and then extended
through each period of his career. But it was well into the early 1960s
before Ellington visited Africa. Thus, Woideck explores what “authentic-
ity” might have meant in the “African” musical evocations of Ellington,
an American-born and self-described writer of “African” music. The evi-
dence of the composer’s concepts of the continent and its music is by
turns rich, fragmentary, and contradictory, but in the end – as the chapter
argues – it is consistent with the complexities of Ellington, the man.
A third organizing theme in the volume can be seen in the “shop talk”
pairing of chapters 4 and 5, by Bill Dobbins and Walter van de Leur,
respectively. These essays offer close musical studies of Ellington’s musical
development as a pianist as well as the changing compositional processes
behind the creation of Ellington’s big band scores. Dobbins observes that
while Duke Ellington’s fame as one of the foremost jazz composers and
bandleaders was well established by the mid-1930s, the significance of his
contributions as a pianist has often been overlooked. Dobbins contends
that the personal pianistic expression Ellington achieved in such diverse
vocabularies as stride, blues, bebop, Latin, European impressionism, and
elements of the musical avant-garde is, perhaps, unsurpassed in the rich
legacy of jazz piano playing. Ellington the pianist is explored both in terms
of basic techniques of musical development and the imaginative use of
special pianistic sounds and effects across a wide variety of settings, from
miniatures to extended rhapsodic forms, with and without his orches-
tra. By contrast, Van de Leur illustrates many important facets of how to
Preface xix
understand Ellington’s highly individual process of writing music – i.e., of

actually committing it to paper, using pencil and eraser. As Van de Leur
demonstrates, the relation between Ellington’s autographs and the per-
formances and recordings of his orchestra is not straightforward. Clearly,
Ellington’s goal was performance. He never sought to publish his music
in print, which further obscured how performance and notation in his
case are connected. As Van de Leur argues, this has led scholars to gloss
over the role of notation in Ellington’s music, and often, to downplay its
importance. This chapter explores the role of music notation in jazz in
general, and in Ellington’s compositional strategies in particular. Van de
Leur asks: how are his written scores and performances connected? What
role does music notation play in Ellington’s creative process? How does
his notated music compare to other compositional practices he applied?
Lastly, as a fourth organizational theme, the volume offers several inno-
vative reconsiderations of the bandleader’s long-undervalued postwar
career. Across chapters 6, 7, and 9, David Schiff, Gabriel Solis, and John
Wriggle convincingly argue for the importance and musical richness of
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn’s compositions from the 1950s and 1960s,
with particular attention to new media, formal musical concerns, and
contemporary postwar cultural politics.
In chapter 6, Schiff considers Ellington’s negotiations of American cul-
tural politics in the 1950s, when political expression in the United States
was repressed both through the operations of the anti-communist cam-
paign of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the pervasive ideology of the Cold
War. In this environment, artists had to find new strategies for protest, and
Ellington was no exception. As Schiff contends, with Such Sweet Thun-
der, composed in 1957, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn extended the
political arguments of such earlier works as Black, Brown and Beige, New
World A-Comin’, The Deep South Suite, and A Tone Parallel to Harlem
through a post-colonial counter-appropriation of the very foundation of
Anglo-American culture: the works of William Shakespeare. While the
implied politics of the music was ignored by contemporary critics, Schiff’s
close reading of the music shows how the demand for civil and human
rights is coded in its musical style and innovative musical forms.
Solis in turn provides a broad-scale consideration of Ellington’s innova-
tive mastery of the LP medium after World War II. This chapter argues that
the bandleader’s work from the LP era (that is, after 1950) is important in
a larger assessment of his creativity throughout his career. Long dismissed
as less creative than his work from the 1930s and 1940s, Solis demonstrates
that these releases in fact shed considerable light on Ellington’s aesthetics
xx Preface
as well as on his approach to cultural production. Importantly, they show-

case Ellington’s life-long interest in technology and its relationship to
progress – both in artistic modernism and in American racial politics. In
addition to looking at issues of cultural production and politics, Solis’s
essay delves closely into the albums Hi-Fi Ellington Uptown, A Drum Is a
Woman, Such Sweet Thunder, and more.
Wriggle’s complementary chapter subsequently shifts the volume’s
media focus to early television, and specifically to Ellington and Billy Stray-
horn’s “musical allegory,” A Drum Is a Woman. Recorded for Columbia
during 1956 and staged with an all-black cast for CBS television in 1957,
this broadcast and album have long been an uncomfortable relic for Elling-
ton fans and scholars. As Wriggle demonstrates, the stage revue narrative
script – as ambitious and controversial as any of Ellington’s extended
works – only begins to outline the wealth of musical, historical, and auto-
biographical references woven throughout. The chapter argues that A
Drum Is a Woman stands as a pivotal inspiration for late-career creativ-
ity, a paragon of jazz misogyny, a groundbreaking milestone in “concept
album” media, a calculated reaffirmation of the maestro’s elder-statesman
status, and a triumphant “tone parallel” of African American history to
join Ellington’s pantheon of programmatic works (including Symphony
in Black, Black, Brown and Beige, My People, and the Sacred Concerts) that
forecasted, documented, and celebrated the American Civil Rights move-
ment. In sum, Wriggle contends that many of the factors that have made
A Drum Is a Woman so awkward a fit into the jazz canon also establish the
work as one of the most important projects of Ellington’s career.
As suggested in my brief account of this volume, there are numerous
intentional thematic and repertory links across both chapters and themes
in the volume as a whole. In addition, while the range and diversity of
this anthology underscores the critical and interdisciplinary breadth of
contemporary Jazz Studies, this rich group of essays equally speaks to the
significant role Ellington continues to play in defining and shaping the
concerns of Jazz Studies in general.
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my most sincere thanks to Edward Green, whose

inspiration led to the co-development and co-planning of this volume
despite his ultimate decision to leave the volume’s editorship under my
care. Many thanks for all your contributions, Ed. Secondly, an equally
important figure in the early development of this volume was Victoria
Cooper, whose patient and insightful editorial stewardship guided the
first few years of this volume’s long gestation period. I need to likewise
note my deep gratitude to my subsequent editor, Kate Brett, as well as to
all of the volume’s contributors (I have been immensely thankful for both
your contributions and patience), and the staff at Cambridge University
Press, whose help, guidance, and assistance have been invaluable as this
volume has moved toward publication.
Lastly, the following individuals and companies have kindly granted
permissions for reproducing numerous invaluable examples and figures
in this volume:
Michael Leavitt, MoveOn.org, A Little Green from a Lot of Peo-
ple (2008). Information on Leavitt can be found at http://
intuitionkitchenproductions.com. All rights reserved. Reprinted by
permission.
Justin Hampton, That One: History (2008). All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission.
Duke Ellington in Senegal photos from the Ruth Ellington Collection
(Collection 415), Archives Center, National Museum of American
History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
A Drum Is a Woman, words and music by Billy Strayhorn and Duke
Ellington. Copyright C 1957 (Renewed) by Music Sales Corporation
and Tempo Music, Inc. All rights for Tempo Music Inc. administered
by Music Sales Corporation. International copyright secured. All
rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
xxi
xxii Acknowledgements
Every effort has been made to secure necessary permissions to reproduce

copyright material in this work, though in some cases it has proved impos-
sible to trace copyright holders. If any omissions are brought to our notice,
we will be happy to include appropriate acknowledgements on reprinting.
Reference Abbreviations
The following is a list of citation abbreviations used in the chapter footnotes for
common reference sources:
Cohen, America Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Duke Ellington Collection Collection 301, Archives Center, National Museum
of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
Ellington, Mistress Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music Is My Mistress
(New York: DaCapo, 1976).
Hajdu, Lush David Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy
Strayhorn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1996).
Hasse, Beyond John Hasse, Beyond Category: The Life and Genius
of Duke Ellington (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1993; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995).
Howland, Uptown John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington,
James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).
Nicholson, Reminiscing Stuart Nicholson, Reminiscing in Tempo: A Portrait
of Duke Ellington (Boston: Northeastern Press,
1999).
Ruth Ellington Collection Collection 415, Archives Center, National Museum
of American History, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.
Stratemann, Day Klaus Stratemann, Duke Ellington: Day by Day and
Film by Film (Copenhagen: JazzMedia, 1992).
Tucker, Early Mark Tucker, Ellington: The Early Years (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991).
Tucker, “Genesis” Mark Tucker, “The Genesis of Black, Brown and
Beige,” Black Music Research Journal 13 (Fall 1993):
67–86.
Tucker, Reader The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
xxiii
xxiv Note on Reference Abbreviations
Vail, Diary, Part 1 Ken Vail, Duke’s Diary, Part One: The Life of Duke
Ellington, 1927–1950 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2002).
Vail, Diary, Part 2 Ken Vail, Duke’s Diary, Part Two: The Life of Duke
Ellington, 1950–1974 (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow
Press, 2002).
Van de Leur, Something Walter van de Leur, Something to Live For: The
Music of Billy Strayhorn (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
1 Ellington the Entertainer: Pageantry and
Prophecy in Duke Ellington’s Films
phil ford
Duke Ellington used the medium of film early, often, and as effectively
as any other jazz musician from the prewar era. While he seldom speaks
in his films and looks uncomfortable when he does, it does not matter.
In his early sound shorts – Black and Tan (RKO, 1929), Bundle of Blues
(Paramount, 1933), and Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life
(Paramount, 1935) – as well as his guest appearances in the feature musical
Cabin in the Sky (MGM, 1943) and other releases, we register his familiar
image of elegance, easy mastery, and urbane self-possession. Compare
him to Louis Armstrong, the other most prominent jazz musician in early
sound film, who might be having more fun in front of the camera but
whose image has not worn as well. Fairly or unfairly, Armstrong has come
to personify the talented black artist bowing and scraping to the white
audience – or, as Miles Davis put it, “grinning like a motherfucker.”1
Ellington cultivated a different and distinct film image that owes its effect
to something more than his acting and has only partly to do with Ellington
himself. As Krin Gabbard notes, Ellington’s image originated in a media
campaign, orchestrated by Irving Mills, that took advantage of the new
medium of sound film but was not limited to it. Once this image was
in place, Ellington became a latent figure of the collective imagination,
the emblem of a certain kind of African American glamor that could
be activated in The Cotton Club (1984), a film that sought to recreate
the period during which Ellington made his first films.2 This image has
worn well indeed, and Ellington’s savvy use of it tells us much about the
racial politics of interwar entertainment and the place of the Negro in the
American imagination of this era and beyond.3
1 Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1989), 406.
2 Krin Gabbard, “Duke’s Place: Visualizing a Jazz Composer,” in Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and
the American Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 165.
3 While Ellington and every other respectful commentator on race used the term “Negro” in the
first half of the twentieth century, its use nowadays needs some explanation. As Richard Dyer
points out, if the term once denoted pride and aspiration, it has since decomposed, giving off an
odor of racialism that subsequent coinages have tried, with mixed success, to dispel. Richard 1
2 phil ford
A film star’s image – imagine those of Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn,

or any figure of comparable glamor and fascination – is a strange kind
of artistic creation, only partly authored by the star herself.4 The image
emerges from the star’s voice and body, the roles she chooses, and the way
she wishes to frame her performances in her public appearances and state-
ments. But her image is also mediated by those who film it, light it, write
ad copy for it, and make music to accompany it; not only everyone who
makes a film, but everyone who writes about it, talks about it, and ulti-
mately everyone who sees it are the co-authors of the image.5 All the same,
the star does have some say over her image. She cannot entirely determine
its final shape or the uses to which it will be put, but she can choose its basic
shape from a range of available options and tailor it to her needs. This is a
complicated creative act, the constitutive act of that artistic medium called
celebrity, which must be mastered by anyone concerned with a public.6
From this point of view, it is instructive to consider Ellington in parallel
with Barack Obama, who will appear several times in this essay. Whatever
their differences, Ellington and Obama are both consummate artists of
image, and they both faced a similar challenge at pivotal moments in
their careers: how to choose an affirmative mode of blackness within
Dyer, “In a Word,” in The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations (London: Routledge,
1993), 8. All the same, it helps to retain this term in some historical contexts, since “Negro”
refers not only to those who belong to what we would now call the black or African American
community, but also to a historicist idea that such people entertained in the earlier decades of
the twentieth century. My use of this term is intended to register a sense of how this community
felt itself to be faring at a particular moment of history – how far it had come since slavery and
how far it had still to go.
4 The topic of glamor lies close to that of stardom and the image: see Lloyd Whitesell, “Trans
Glam: Gender Magic in the Film Musical,” in Queering the Popular Pitch, ed. Sheila Whiteley
and Jennifer Rycenga (London: Routledge, 2006), 263–77; Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2007).
5 This diffuse condition is mirrored in film musicals of the kind in which Ellington appeared.
Salman Rushdie once remarked that while we are used to attributing the iconic details of The
Wizard of Oz to a unified authorial intention, such films are “as near as dammit to that
will-o’-the-wisp of modern critical theory: the authorless text.” Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of
Oz (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 16. For this reason, then, it is not very helpful to ask
how much Ellington himself intended his image, either in general outlines or in the context of
any one film. Clearly he had much to do with it, but so too did his manager, his directors, and
ultimately the entire system of American cultural representation.
6 See Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2002), and
especially its title essay, which works through the paradoxes of “the public.” Warner’s essay “The
Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig J. Calhoun
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), deals with the political uses of the image. See also Joshua
Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994); Su Holmes and Sean Redmond (eds.), Framing Celebrity: New Directions in
Celebrity Culture (London: Routledge, 2006).
Ellington the Entertainer 3
a limited field of options, or (put another way) how to choose from

available categories of racial representation in such a way as to appear
“beyond category.” In the 2008 presidential election, Obama could never
just happen to be black. He was entering an arena already crowded with
racial images and could not but be closely observed as he picked his way
among them. His opponents did their best to tag him with ready-at-hand
images of the black politician: the religious firebrand of the Farrakhan
type, the black nationalist with ties to the 1960s radical Left, the corrupt
Chicago Machine flunky, and so on. There were many ways to make
blackness a liability for a rising politician; the trick was to figure out how
to make being black an asset. What Obama did was to make his blackness
the emblem of a history for which Americans hungered. He drew on
a powerful tradition of representation in American life: the notion that
African Americans carry a special burden of history, and that their destiny
is bound up with the fate of the whole nation. This is an understanding
of history underwritten by prophecy.
Prophecy should not be confused with fortune-telling; it is not a simple
act of foretelling but a mode of historical consciousness that links histori-
cal moments into transtemporal constellations, such that past and future
moments exist in the present. Prophecy can take the form of jeremiad,
with the prophet damning the corrupt present and promising God’s judg-
ment in the future, and as Anthony Bogues notes, prophecy is uniquely
available as a register of dissent in Africana radical traditions. Rastafarians,
for example, “develop conceptions and historical narratives that collapse
past and present, making no linear chronological distinctions,” so that the
Victorian colonial magnate Cecil Rhodes is a courtier of Elizabeth I, the
repressive regime of Babylon comprises Roman and British empires, and
Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (1892–1975) is the living incarnation
of an ancient African kingship.7 But in American political rhetoric, power
lies in the appeal to what is already felt and known, or rather what is
felt to be known, by the widest possible electorate. Thus, for a politician
like Obama to use prophetic rhetoric effectively, its reach must extend far
beyond black radical traditions.8 And indeed the tradition of historical
7 Anthony Bogues, “Opening Chant,” in Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political
Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), 19.
8 David Chappell has argued that it was the black prophetic tradition that moved the Civil Rights
movement out of stalemate and towards its eventual victory; as such, prophecy is a particularly
distinguished example of a political notion that originates in Africana discourse but attains a
general influence and power. David Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death
of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
4 phil ford
representation on which Obama drew ranges across all divisions of Ameri-

can culture.9 That tradition is alloyed from what Susan Gillman calls “race
melodramas,” which include both W. E. B. Du Bois’s lyrical black histo-
riography and Thomas Dixon’s white-supremacist fiction The Clansman.
The narrative engine of the race melodramas is what I call prophetic his-
tory but what Gillman calls occult history, which she describes as “a kind
of futurology based on the esoteric wisdom of the past [that] constructs
mystical interrelations among past, present, and future . . . the multidi-
mensionality of occult time accounts for hidden intrusions of the past
into the present as well as for ongoing and unredeemed claims of the past
on the present.”10
In this essay, I add the major items of Duke Ellington’s small but remark-
able interwar filmography to Gillman’s list of race melodramas. Ellington’s
films recast black experience in the prophetic mood, presenting Negro his-
tory as a pageant enacted in the suffering, laboring, or performing black
body. Prophetic history gave Ellington a new entertainment image to
compete with the minstrel stereotypes that he despised as “ofay hocus-
pocus.”11 These stereotypes are tough weeds, hard to uproot, for reasons
that go to the heart of what entertainment is and how it works. Entertain-
ment comprises a syntax built on the endless varied repetition of images
that drastically de-individualize characters. Blacks in film did not get per-
sonalities or stories of their own, but only such stories as their stereotypes
allowed. Ellington’s answer was not to do away with entertainment, as
is often alleged, but to give key black characters a better stereotype. In
Ellington’s short films, history is the solvent of the image, even as history
itself covertly becomes yet another image. By these means, Ellington and
his collaborators offered a solution to one of the central problems of his
career, which he once stated concisely as a wish to “give an American
9 Obama (and Ellington) avoided the bitter tone of jeremiad that some scholars consider the
essential ingredient of prophetic political rhetoric. As George Shulman notes, Obama struck a
prophetic tone that was well-suited to a racially mixed electorate, much of which was not eager
to be reminded of the nation’s troubled racial past: “Partly, to become ‘our first black
president,’ he narrated neither a tragic retelling of American nationalism nor a jeremiad calling
for fateful choices about practices long deemed legitimate, but a poetry of the future that
repeats the redemptive promise of American exceptionalism.” George Schulman, American
Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008), 225–6.
10 Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), 201.
11 Duke Ellington, “Beige,” Black, Brown and Beige, undated typescript, Duke Ellington
Collection, 3.
audience entertainment without compromising the dignity of the Negro

people.”12
Before considering Ellington’s prophetic tone, though, we turn again
to Barack Obama, standing at the moment of his historic victory. Did
you notice the word “historic” in the last sentence? I suspect you did not,
because it is such a cliché: everybody called Obama’s election historic. On
television, in editorial pages, and in blogs and public diaries, voters wrote
about the unfamiliar and heady feeling of a private moment of experience
coming in contact with the great tectonic movements of national history.
Writers felt their ability to participate in history and sense its movements –
what we might call a historical faculty – to be gaining strength and becom-
ing manifest in huge crowds, long voter lines, and one another’s public
diaries. The master stroke of the Obama campaign was to orchestrate this
sensation on a mass scale.
We all imagine we know what this history is, but on reflection it becomes
less clear. There are at least three different ways of framing this event as
“historical,” each of which rests upon a distinct metaphysics. As political
scientist W. Phillips Shively once remarked, “historical” usually means
“something I’ll be able to tell my grandkids about.”13 All those commem-
orative plates and coins that were huckstered around the inauguration
pitched the opportunity to “collect a piece of history,” which really meant
to pick up a souvenir that would prove, to some hypothetical future gen-
eration, that you were there – maybe not at the inauguration itself, but
you had at least watched it on television. This scenario represents a his-
torical vernacular, an unschooled way of thinking the present moment
historically.14 It is a way of taking a step back and viewing events within
a wider frame, and in this respect it has something in common with a
second mood of history. This is the way in which historians have always
understood their subject, as a pattern of cause and effect that precipitates
change and renders it legible. But the emotional appeal of the Obama
12 Duke Ellington and Edward Murrow, “Duke Ellington on Gershwin’s ‘Porgy,’” New Theatre
(December 1935), reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 116. For a valuable study of the ways in which
Ellington negotiated a racialized entertainment milieu, see Graham Lock, “In the Jungles of
America: History Without Saying It,” in Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past
in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1999), 77–118.
13 W. Phillips Shively, private communication with the author.
14 My phrasing here is indebted to Frederic Jameson’s definition of postmodernism as the
“attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically
in the first place.” Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), ix.
6 phil ford
campaign did not depend upon this analytical conception of changing

time.
The campaign’s strategy was to involve people by suggesting that they
could feel themselves participating in history. “Change” and “hope” –
Obama’s entire campaign boiled down to two words – together constitute
the kernel of an entire idea of history. There is hope because change is
at hand; change is at hand because there is hope. This narrative does not
imply linear causality, in which thing A precedes and causes thing B; it is
not that change is because of hope or vice versa. Then how do we know
that change is at hand if we cannot see the cause for it? It is because change,
the movement of history, is foreordained. “It’s been a long time coming,
but I know a change is gonna come,” the refrain from Sam Cooke’s Civil
Rights anthem, strikes the tone of prophecy, and this is the tone that
Obama also sounded when he paraphrased “A Change Is Gonna Come”
in his 4 November victory speech at Grant Park:15
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things
are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time,
who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer . . .
It’s the answer that led those who’ve been told for so long by so many to be cynical
and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc
of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.
It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this date in
this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.16
The tone of prophecy is biblical, of course, and has long seasoned the
oratory of black churches. It is perhaps most familiar from the rhetoric
of Martin Luther King’s speeches, but its use in civil-rights discourse goes
back much earlier, for example in the writings of Reverdy C. Ransom,
an African Methodist Episcopal Church bishop and major early exponent
of the Social Gospel.17 The prophetic tone marks a sermon quoted in an
15 While this speech is an especially weighty instance of Obama’s prophetic rhetoric, it is one of
many. For instance, his autobiography recounts the story of his joining Trinity United Church
of Christ in prophetic terms. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and
Inheritance (New York: Crown, 1995), 294. And as David A. Frank writes, Obama skillfully
used the prophetic register in handling the fallout from Trinity pastor Jeremiah Wright’s fiery
sermons, which had turned up on YouTube and threatened to end Obama’s candidacy. David
A. Frank, “The Prophetic Voice and the Face of the Other in Barack Obama’s ‘A More Perfect
Union’ Address, March 18, 2008,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 12 (2009): 167–94.
16 Barack Obama, election night victory speech, in Tim Davidson (ed.), The Essential Obama:
The Speeches of Barack Obama (Chicago: Aquitaine Media Corp, 2009), 67–9.
17 Ransom was an ally of W. E. B. Du Bois and an important early voice of Christian socialist
dissent. For a selection of his writings, see Anthony B. Pinn (ed.), Making the Gospel Plain: The
article that took part in a discourse of historical reclamation that played

out in the black press at around the beginning of Ellington’s career:
I hear the pattering footsteps of 20,000,000 dusky children yet unborn, echoing
down the corridors of time. A generation hence they will be here unbarring wide
the gates of life. I hear them uttering the dumb and inarticulate aspiration of a race
so long restrained . . .
I see dark-visioned countenances everywhere walking in the paths of men and
unafraid: I see unwavering eyes look forth from faces no longer mantled with age-
long grime, but with a look of stern determination and resolve. I see a day of God,
and not a day of color and race, in which men trace with pardonable pride the
fading rays of Oriental sunshine in their veins.
I see now, near at hand, the opening day of the darker races of mankind in which
Americans of African descent stand forth among the first Americans.18
The power of this language is due in part to its air of antiquity; prophecy is
perhaps the oldest mode of historical understanding. As Frederic Jameson
notes, “some conception of divine pansynchronism, of the providential
anticipation or the thoroughgoing predestination of all the acts of history,
is surely the first mystified form whereby people (in the ‘West’) attempted
to conceptualize the logic of history as a whole, and to formulate its dialec-
tical interrelationship and its telos.”19 As a “dialectical interrelationship”
of historical moments, prophecy is not simply foreknowledge, a present
glimpse to a future time; it is the co-presence of present and future. Time
is neither strictly linear nor entirely cyclical, but a procession of moments
honeycombed with interconnections. The narratives of this time lead
not to outcomes but destinies, great ends that are ever implicit in their
beginnings.
As seen in Figures 1.1 and 1.2,20 the art images of Obama that were
circulated during his campaign tended to picture him as co-present with
history – as the current manifestation of a transhistorical national dynasty,
as a reimagining of Abraham Lincoln, as a man who is both representative
and exemplary of the American people, or as a man in whom an entire
Writings of Bishop Reverdy C. Ransom (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999);
Ransom’s essay “The Coming Vision” is particularly relevant to my argument here.
18 Reverdy C. Ransom, quoted in F. E. Bowles, “Civilization in Africa at One Time Superior to
Ours,” Chicago Defender, 11 October 1924, A9.
19 Jameson, Postmodernism, 327.
20 Also see the powerful image of Aniekan Udotio’s Here from 2008, which is reproduced at
http://robertoormond.blogspot.se/2015/03/arte-para-campanha-de-barack-obama.html
(accessed 18 May 2016).
8 phil ford
Figure 1.1 Michael Leavitt, MoveOn.org, A Little Green from a Lot of People (2008)
racial history is recapitulated.21 Note how in these images we see the figures
of history arrayed in procession, like figures in a pageant, or in something
like a historical diorama, with all the stations of history visible at once.
Such images gain power from the static and hieratic vision of history they
imply. If in the mood of prophecy the ends of history are present in its
beginnings, history becomes a great crystallized structure, an object of
revelation that the pageant makes visible as a procession of symbolically
charged figures. Such a procession displays events that happen one after
the other, and yet as stations of a complete circuit. Pageants are static
collections presented serially.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, prophetic history was given
form in actual pageants. The historical pageant was the privileged form by
which Americans could allegorize their history – a history in which a future
destiny is sealed in past covenants and deeds. As David Glassberg notes,
“the pageant form, and the peculiar historical consciousness it embodied
and helped to shape, combined the new progressive view of history as
social and technological evolution with the customary civil-religious view
of history as divine revelation.”22 Communities used pageantry as a “ritual
of social transformation” in which the future would be invoked by a kind
of sympathetic magic. What distinguished the form from other kinds of
public entertainment was “the belief that history could be made into a
dramatic public ritual through which the residents of a town, by acting
out the right version of their past, could bring about some kind of future
social and political transformation.”23
While many different geographic and ethnic communities staged their
own pageants, narratives of historical destiny and redemption resonated
21 These images, and many others relevant to this essay, may be found in Shepard Fairey and
Jennifer Gross (eds.), Art for Obama: Designing Manifest Hope and the Campaign for Change
(New York: Abrams Image, 2009).
22 David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth
Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 286.
23 Ibid., 4.
Figure 1.2 Justin Hampton, That One: History (2008)
with special power among African Americans. They had the most to gain
from the forward movement of history and the most to reclaim from a
wounded past. W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that by enacting pageantry,
African Americans were aligning with a timeless inheritance: “All through
Africa pageantry and dramatic recital is close mingled with religious rites
and in America the ‘Shout’ of the church revival in its essential pure
drama.”24 To this end, Du Bois created The Star of Ethiopia, a vast spectacle
that moved from ancient Ethiopia and Egypt through slavery and finally
to freedom.25 This historical procession was bound into a transhistorical
unity by a series of allegorical tableaux that represent the Negro’s gifts to
the world (Figures 1.3 and 1.4).
Mark Tucker and others have noticed the similarities between such
pageants and Duke Ellington’s many historically minded works, most
notably Black, Brown and Beige (1943) and his short film Symphony in
24 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Drama Among Black Folks,” Crisis, August 1916, 169.
25 Other notable African American pageants include O Sing a New Song (1934), which was
choreographed by Katherine Dunham and provided with music by Noble Sissle and W. C.
Handy, and The Open Door (1921), for which Fletcher Henderson played piano. See also Plays
and Pageants from the Life of the Negro, ed. Willis Richardson (Washington, DC: Associated
Publishers, 1930), an anthology of Negro historical pageants intended for amateur
performance.
10 phil ford
Figure 1.3 Tableau from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Star of Ethiopia (Crisis, August 1916)
Figure 1.4 Figures from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Star of Ethiopia (Crisis, December 1915)
Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1935).26 Tucker speculates that Ellington

may have attended The Star of Ethiopia. More certainly, though, Ellington
had read another work of Du Bois, The Negro (1915), which Gillman
describes as a race melodrama, a submerged (but nevertheless potent)
expression of Du Bois’s “pan-racial, transnational, and metahistorical”
vision of the Negro.27 The evidence for this connection is found in Elling-
ton’s paraphrase of at least one passage from The Negro in an unpublished
typescript scenario for Black, Brown and Beige.28 This typescript tells the
tale of Boola, a black Adam who is a witness to and actor in all the signal
moments of Negro history. The passage most directly modeled on Du Bois
marks the moment where Boola reflects on his abject condition and takes
comfort from what Ransom called the “Oriental sunshine” that has shone
on every moment of his march through history and will shine at its end:
Look, now, is this not the same golden sun

Which fired your brain along the calm Euphrates?
And smiled upon your seeking, searching sorties
As you followed the course of the Ganges.
Absorbing here poetic, soaring folklore,
Leaving there a part of you . . . a rhythmic song?
Yes. It’s the same. The same old sun which smiled
Upon you as you pushed along the Nile and planted
Seeds. Seeds of the first civilization
Known to man!
Drink them in . . . their glowing stories
Of Babylon and all her glories
Knowing well her culture sprang
From black men. Forgotten long ago . . . Meroe . . .
From whence the first bright light flamed up
In Ethiopia to guide mankind along the way.
Buried in the dark, uneasy conscience of Man
Lies the bright and glorious Truth
About your heritage. Someday it shall burst its bonds
And shine forth the blinding Light of Reason.29
26 Tucker, Early; Kevin Gaines, “Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige, and the Cultural Politics
of Race,” in Music and the Racial Imagination, ed. Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 585–602; Scott DeVeaux, “‘Black, Brown and
Beige’ and the Critics,” Black Music Research Journal 13 (Autumn 1993): 125–46; Harvey G.
Cohen, “Duke Ellington and Black Brown and Beige: The Composer as Historian at Carnegie
Hall,” American Quarterly 56 (December 2004): 1003–34.
27 Gillman, Blood Talk, 151. 28 Cohen, “Duke Ellington and Black Brown and Beige,” 1032.
29 Ellington, “Black,” Black, Brown and Beige typescript, 5–6.
12 phil ford
Tucker argues that what Ellington’s scenario for Black, Brown and Beige
has in common with a wider contemporary discourse of black historical
recovery is a sense of progress: the progress of the race and the progress of
history.30 While true enough, Tucker’s formulation misses the dialectical
motion of Ellington’s prophetic history; movement forward is not move-
ment in one direction only. In the prophetic mode, we see history moving
forward, but the goal has always been present from the beginning. At the
turning of a great wheel, we come to the place destined, which is always
and necessarily the place where it all started. Africa is present in Harlem,
as is Dixie and the slave ships. Ellington symbolizes this throughout the
typescript through an onomatopoeic all-caps “BOOM” of the drum in all
the various forms it takes throughout history. And that BOOM resounds
in the opening episodes of Black, Brown, and Beige and Symphony in Black,
both of which are stylized work songs.
Symphony in Black is a ten-minute film structured as four episodes
from Negro life, separated by interludes that show Ellington composing
and performing the accompanying music as a concert work. This film
presents a version of what John Howland calls the “Africa to Dixie to
Harlem” narrative structure, which was a staple of nightclub revues but
is here put to a different kind of cultural work. Howland writes that “the
fundamental purpose of the . . . Africa-Dixie-Harlem program model of
interwar entertainment was to glorify or celebrate modern Harlem as the
glamorous apotheosis of the rich diversity of black musical culture.”31 I
would add that Symphony in Black is glorified in another way: it is not
only a celebration of progress from Dixie to Harlem, but a celebration of a
racial essence that has endured through each historical stage. The glories
of Harlem music recapitulate the entire span of racial history.
In the opening scene of Symphony in Black, “The Laborers,” we see
black bodies, muscles and sinews standing out in sculptural relief in
the scene’s high-contrast lighting, monumentalized in much the same
way Paul Robeson’s body is in the montage of black labor presented
in “Old Man River,” the standout number of James Whale’s film of
Show Boat (Universal, 1936).32 Both sequences mold black bodies into
30 Tucker, “Genesis,” 67–86. 31 Howland, Uptown, 135.

32 Hazel Carby’s study of the representational uses of Robeson’s body is in some ways parallel to
this essay: Carby wishes to see each of Robeson’s public images as actor, musician, and athlete
as “a particular modernist cultural artifact of imagination and longing, which attempts to
establish a relation between the African American male body and the state of the national
soul.” Hazel V. Carby, “The Body and Soul of Modernism,” in Race Men: The W. E. B. Du Bois
Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 45–83.
quasi-geometric mass forms that recall the muralist iconography of the

era’s Popular Front culture. A decade later, Barry Ulanov coldly noted this
resemblance and implied that Symphony in Black offered only variations
on old entertainment stereotypes.33 However, Richard Dyer points out
that Robeson’s performance in “Old Man River” could sustain at least two
different readings. In one, the cause of black suffering could be “laid at
the door of the river’s indifference and . . . transmitted into the eternal lot
of mankind, as borne, conveniently for the white half of the community,
by blacks.”34 In the other reading, river imagery could signify crossing to
freedom and thus deliverance and futurity. Either way, the suffering and
laboring black body is the medium in which history is contained and by
which it is represented.
If we apply these two readings to Symphony in Black, the distinction
between them seems to turn on whether one chooses to interpret the
historical progression of the Negro from Africa to present-day America
as one of progress or eternal sameness. But what I am trying to do is
suggest a third option, a historical mood in which progress and eternity
are bound up with one another. This is the mood of prophetic history.
Symphony in Black presents a pageant of the Negro at different points in
his development, starting with labor and moving through the pleasures
and pains of free city life (“A Triangle: Dance – Jealousy – Blues”), grief
and redemption in the church (“Hymn of Sorrow”), and the fully modern
Negro of Harlem (“Harlem Rhythm”). Just as white light refracts into
different colors as it passes through a prism, Symphony in Black depicts a
unified and unchanging racial essence that passes through a prism of time
and manifests in human situations at different historical moments. What
results is a composite image of the Negro as a history-bound subject, one
whose very essence is historical. His full being is unfolded only in the
superposition of images separated in time and, necessarily, presented in
series, though all simultaneously present and inscribed in his body. The
modern Negro contains multitudes: he is the culmination of historical
process but has left nothing behind.
This is the representation of the Negro with which Ellington (and his
handlers) allied his own image. The dissolves between Symphony in Black’s
historical tableaux and scenes of Ellington composing and performing
their music present Ellington himself as the exemplary modern Negro in
whom all historical stages are recapitulated and in whom future promise
33 Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington (New York: Creative Age Press, 1946), 161.
34 Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 83.
14 phil ford
is latent. It is on this note that Ellington concludes both Symphony in Black

and his typescript with a paean to Harlem, which like Ellington himself
both contains and fulfills a racial past:
TAKE HEART!
In every land where you have been
You’re left your mark on all the men
Who since have perished . . .
And you’ve survived!
The Caribs and the Indians
Have long since vanished
You’ve kept a part of them alive
And in your song their song’s revived!
Yes, Harlem!
Land of valiant youth,
You’ve wiped the make-up from your face,
And shed your borrowed spangles.
You’ve donned the uniform of Truth
And hid the hurt that dangles
In heart and mind. And one by one
You’ve set your shoulders straight
To meet each challenge and to wait
Till justice unto you is done.35
Elsewhere I have defined an “image” as a multimedia constellation of

visual, auditory, and textual cues that cohere in a simple thought-shape.36
Images have a peculiar phenomenology: they detonate in the mind all at
once, registering as simple and instantly comprehensible shapes that can
succeed one another quickly and be shuffled like a deck of cards, or, as
Don Bogle writes, sit “like square boxes on a shelf.”37 In entertainment,
character is conveyed in the quickest way possible, through a radical
35 Duke Ellington, “Beige,” 5.

36 Phil Ford, “Music at the Edge of the Construct,” Journal of Musicology 26 (April 2009): 240–73.
Although he does not call them “images,” Michael Long has written an important monograph
on the cultural logic of these audiovisual collections; see Michael Long, Beautiful Monsters:
Imagining the Classic in Musical Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). For a
pioneering study of film-star images, see Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society
(New York: Routledge, 1986; 2004); for a belletristic study of a musical performer’s image, see
Wayne Koestenbaum, “The Callas Cult,” in The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the
Mystery of Desire (New York: Poseidon Press, 1993; Da Capo, 2001), 134–53.
37 Don Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in
American Films, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 4.
reduction: the sign for the character becomes identical to the character.
I invoke the image of the Mammy, for instance, and we can all doubtless
call to mind staring eyes, booming voice, stout figure, and a handkerchief
wrapped around the head; perhaps we imagine her with feet planted
stubbornly in the earth and hands balled up at her sides, telling off a lazy
husband or delivering some folksy home truths. Now, any one of these
things (the rolling eyes, for example) is itself a sign. But the signs all tend
to suggest one another; when one appears, the rest jump to attention, and
their mutual implication happens so quickly and completely they cohere
into a single image reassembled in our memory. The image thus can always
be reduced to a single metonymic trace. The “Historical Keepsake Photo”
that a Tennessee Republican Party staffer got caught emailing – Obama
reduced to two eyes staring out of a black field – was an effective racist
dog whistle, because all the components of a complete racialized image
(pop eyes, shuffling gait, dull-witted speech, etc.) are implicit in the single
trace, though if you object, the perpetrator can always say, hey, it’s just a
pair of eyes.
This is how all images work, not just racial ones. In the opening of The
Band Wagon (MGM, 1953), for example, Fred Astaire’s postwar image as
the figure of a bygone era of entertainment can be reduced to a top hat
and cane left unsold at auction.38 But racial images make us more keenly
aware that such a reduction eliminates a character’s autonomous history.
Hattie McDaniel’s Queenie from the 1936 Show Boat can be conveyed
in a single frame. The hefty profile and rolling eyes constitute the sign
that stands in for a character; this is all you need to know about her.
If we ever learn any biographical details, it is only to reinforce the basic
pattern. Thus Karen Alexander writes of the happy shock of seeing Carmen
Jones (Twentieth-Century Fox, 1954) as a child and finally being able to
see a black character “complete with a character, a life, a history.”39 You
can see, then, why history might be an important term to oppose such
racialized images, and why Obama’s and Ellington’s images were well-
chosen. History is the solvent of the image.
The instant character I have described is, by nature, essentializing, and
entertainment cannot easily discard it. It was basic to the grammar of
vaudeville, the minstrelsy that preceded it, and the sound film entertain-
ment that replaced it. As Henry Jenkins has pointed out, vaudeville’s
audiences demanded immediacy above all and compelled performers
38 Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 79.
39 Karen Alexander, “Fatal Beauties: Black Women in Hollywood,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire,
ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, 1991), 46.
16 phil ford
to act with the utmost intensity and directness: “This brutal economy
weighed against the exposition necessary to develop rounded characters or
particularized situations. An elaborate system of typage developed: exag-
gerated costumes, facial characteristics, phrases, and accents were meant
to reflect general personality traits viewed as emblematic of a particu-
lar class, region, ethnic group, or gender.”40 The instantaneity by which
characters register as types is one manifestation of a more general enter-
tainment syntax that Jenkins called the “vaudeville aesthetic” and which
is structured by sequences of instantaneous images.
George Gottlieb, booker for the New York Palace Theater at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, threw light on this syntax when he wrote
about the structural considerations involved in putting together a variety
show.41 These considerations boil down to the management of attraction,
variety, audience attention, and climax – interdependent categories that
have in common a purely functional aim of managing audience response.
The vaudeville aesthetic, and the aesthetic of entertainment more gener-
ally, relies on a set of rational calculations with a limited and well-defined
aim of engaging an audience with a series of vivid moments (character
types, gags, stunts, and so on) and stringing those moments together like
glittering baubles on a chain. Each moment in a series is calculated to catch
and sustain attention through its mingled novelty and familiarity. Enter-
tainment audiences do not judge by the criteria of art music traditions,
where part and whole are indissolubly bound in an organic structure that
offers an aesthetic and intellectual challenge to the listener. The entertain-
ment aesthetic is geared rather to generating sensory excitement by means
of an escalating series of vivid and contrasting moments that culminate
in a big finish.42
If we were asked to state why, say, 42nd Street (Warner Bros., 1933)
is entertainment, it would not be enough to say that it is entertaining.
Even if we thought this film was stupid and annoying, we would have to
acknowledge that it is entertainment in some conventional sense that is not
dependent upon our taste. Defining entertainment at this more abstract
40 Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 70.
41 George Gottlieb, “Psychology of the American Vaudeville Show from the Manager’s Point of
View,” in American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries, ed. Charles W. Stein (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf; Da Capo Press, 1984), 179–81; John Howland uses this article as a point of
departure for his own understanding of revue entertainment; see Howland, Uptown, 83–6.
42 This was known as the “wow finish” among vaudeville professionals; for a thorough analysis of
the practical considerations involved in contriving a good finish, see Walter De Leon, “The
Wow Finish,” in American Vaudeville, 193–208.
level is not easy, though the general aesthetic tendencies I have suggested
might help. (42nd Street is certainly entertainment by these terms.) Beyond
these, entertainment also has social and institutional characteristics.43
First, entertainment is not a property of all places and times, but is a
function of its characteristic institutions – the institutions of technolo-
gized mass culture within a capitalist economy. Second, entertainment is
populist: it proclaims its difference from art and its ambition to satisfy
as many people as possible, which, within its characteristic institutional
setting, means paying customers.44
Third, entertainment belongs to the domain of leisure, the “free time”
in which we do not have to discharge our duties to work or family. But
unlike games, hobbies, social chat, and so on, entertainment is something
we typically pay for in modern life, which means that it is by and large
a professional practice. Mind you, the barrier between professional and
non-professional entertainment is porous, subject to upward pressure
from aspiring amateurs and downward pressure from professionals who
seek to gloss over their separation from the mass audience.45 But the
price an amateur pays to enter the professional sphere is the standard
that professionals so often affect to transcend: the professional practice of
entertainment depends on the willingness of a mass audience to pay for
it, and that willingness in turn depends on very stable codes.46
43 This discussion is freely adapted from Richard Dyer, “The Notion of Entertainment,” in Only
Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992), 11–15.
44 For reasons that go beyond the scope of this essay, since World War II a great many of these
entertainment consumers will do anything to avoid being identified as such. Their chosen
forms of entertainment – punk or postpunk music, for example, like Gang of Four’s ironically
titled Entertainment! – entertain precisely in flattering their audiences that what they are
consuming is not, in fact, entertainment at all, but the negation of it, and furthermore that
they are not even consumers, but rebels, or what Thomas Frank calls “the rebel consumer”; see
Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (eds.), Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler (New
York: Norton, 1997). As Carl Wilson points out, punk fans set their music against what they
conceive entertainment to be, namely schmaltz, and yet punk relies on a conventionalized
repertory of stock gestures for its angry, defiant effects. As Wilson puts it, “punk rock is anger’s
schmaltz.” Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (New York:
Continuum, 2007), 125. I argue elsewhere that this paradoxical dynamic of anti-consumerist
consumerism, or anti-entertainment entertainment, long antedates punk; see Phil Ford, Dig:
Sound and Music in Hip Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
45 As Jane Feuer has commented, the dissolution of an integral community relationship between
artists and audiences in an age of mass media is the dirty secret that entertainment always tries
to hide, and she devotes much of her ground-breaking monograph on the American film
musical to understanding how entertainment fashions a compensatory “myth of community.”
Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
46 Feuer, The Hollywood Musical; Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987).
18 phil ford
Entertainment is a professional practice of giving you what you want –

singing a song you have already heard, showing you characters you have
already met. The pitched battle between art and entertainment in the twen-
tieth century has tended to revolve around this point. Art is supposed to be
that which challenges our settled views; it is not what you want, but what
you need. Thus the language of modernist art music – actually a Babel
of contending tongues – developed with dazzling speed, while the syntax
of entertainment remains strict and conservative, bound by generic con-
ventions that change at the pace of continental drift. What people want is
always what they already know; however, it cannot be boring. (In everyday
use, “entertaining” is the antonym of “boring.”) So we are presented with
the apparent contradiction of a practice structured by endless repetition
and yet dependent on constant novelty. The contradiction between nov-
elty and repetition is really no contradiction, though: this novelty is the
newness of variation on common themes, not the newness of modern art.
What Jenkins says of vaudeville is equally true of our own teen pop and
TV cop shows, which likewise give us “the pleasure of infinite diversity in
infinite combinations,” the fixed and stereotyped items of its expressive
codes shuffled like cards into colorful and ever-changing arrays.47
In short, entertainment comprises codes of historically locatable pro-
fessional practice aimed at eliciting familiar responses from paying cus-
tomers. However, all this means that entertainment representations of
race are inherently reductive and necessarily crude. Black images are always
low-res; entertainment’s phenomenology of instant character and reliance
on popular received opinion work against three-dimensional black char-
acters. For this reason, critics and scholars have always tended to settle the
contradiction between Ellington the entertainer and Ellington the digni-
fied artist by claiming that Ellington was not really an entertainer at all.48
And yet Ellington was obviously an entertainer – he was a consummate
professional, popular with a mass audience, and a supreme virtuoso in
manipulating vernacular codes.
We can see critical anxiety about entertainment playing out in the crit-
icism of R. D. Darrell, one of the first and most influential of Ellington’s
literary admirers. In 1927, near the beginning of Ellington’s career, Darrell
wrote a short record review of Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy where he
47 Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, 63.

48 In this they were following Ellington’s lead. For example, note Ellington’s signifying answer to
the first question of the interview that concludes his memoir. “Q: What are your major
interests? A: Well, I live in the realm of art and have no monetary interests.” Ellington, Mistress,
452.
praised this arrangement’s “stunts” as “exceptionally original and strik-

ing [and] performed musically, even artistically.”49 These “stunts” were
standout instrumental effects, including Bubber Miley’s famous high B
at the beginning of his first solo, his plunger-muted growls and smears,
an answering moan from Sam Nanton’s trombone, and the concluding
allusion to Chopin’s Marche funèbre. Five years after his first review of this
number, Darrell recalled that he had once found those “stunts” merely
amusing: “I laughed like everyone else over its instrumental wa-waing and
gargling and gobbling, the piteous whinnying of a very ancient horse, the
lugubrious reminiscence of the Chopin funeral march.” He had, in other
words, been listening to Black and Tan Fantasy with ears conditioned by
entertainment aesthetics. From this perspective, he heard this music as a
series of vivid events made savory through their novelty and variety. But
even then, Darrell later wrote, he had sensed something more profound in
this low milieu. In the intervening years, Darrell’s aesthetics had become
more sober and modernistic, and from this later perspective he heard
Ellington’s “stunts” as structurally and aesthetically necessary moments
integrated into an organic structure. To lay out his vision of Ellington’s
music as art, he begins his famous 1932 essay, “Black Beauty,” with a state-
ment that sets the program for critical and scholarly writing on Ellington
in the decades to come, wherein analysis would be employed to reveal a
finer sensibility that emerges from the dross of mere entertainment:
In the last century music has immeasurably enlarged its scope and enriched its
texture, but there has been an increasing preoccupation with sheer rhetoric and
gaudy sound splashes, the vehemence of whose statement disguises their essential
incoherence and unassimilation of true feeling. Decadence sets in with its emphasis
on detail at the expense of the whole. The tendency to schrecklichkeit, the striving
for greater dynamic extremes, is not yet curbed. The urge to originality defeats
itself, forcing into the background organic principles: economy of means, satisfying
proportion of detail, and the sense of inevitability – of anticipation and revelatory
fulfillment – that are the decisive qualifications of musical form.50
Make no mistake: Black and Tan Fantasy is a masterpiece, and I am not

arguing that it is “really” entertainment when everybody has been thinking
it was art. It seems a pointless thing to argue anyway – if the sorry history
of music criticism demonstrates anything, it is that one man’s “organic
49 R. D. Darrell, “Criticism in the Phonograph Monthly Review (1927–1931),” reprinted in Tucker,

Reader, 33–4.
50 R. D. Darrell, “Black Beauty,” disques (Philadelphia: H. Royer Smith, June 1932); reprinted in
Tucker, Reader, 57.
20 phil ford
principles” are another man’s “emphasis on detail at the expense of the

whole.” (Anyway, do we have to choose?) What I do argue is that Ellington’s
art can be understood in terms of entertainment codes – indeed, it cannot
be fully understood without them. This much John Howland has made
clear in his indispensable Ellington Uptown. Moreover, we need to realize
that Ellington’s image as a dignified artist was an entertainment image, and
a potent one that could open up to a much larger discourse of blackness
and history.
Symphony in Black represents the most direct use of a recuperative trope
of racial memory in Ellington’s films, but the same trope also distinguishes
the earlier short film Black and Tan. The plot of this second film is simple:
Ellington is a penniless artist and Fredi, his lover, is a dancer striving to
support him; ignoring her ill health, she takes a new job at a nightclub but
collapses during her showcase solo performance as Ellington’s orchestra
accompanies her. On her deathbed, she asks Ellington to play the Black and
Tan Fantasy we saw him rehearsing in their apartment at the beginning of
the film. On the level of narrative, Black and Tan establishes Ellington as a
performer caught in the contradictions between art and entertainment –
contradictions that the film’s melodramatic ending raises to the level of
tragedy. But as David Metzer points out, it was not the melodrama that
attracted audiences, but the promise of “primitivist spectacle” and exotic
nightlife.51 Black and Tan is a revue dressed up with a plot. This design
motivates a succession of scenes that serve to introduce various kinds
of entertainment (music, comedy, and dance numbers) and leads to a
spectacular finale. Black and Tan is variety entertainment that makes a
spectacle of its star performer’s artistic transcendence of entertainment.
Let us consider each of the film’s four acts in turn:
1. The opening musical number: Ellington and trumpeter Arthur
Whetsol rehearse the Black and Tan Fantasy. This scene affords the film
the opportunity to showcase the “stunts” that Darrell admired and which
formed the basis of Ellington’s “jungle” style, an exotica code calculated to
appeal to white tourists “expecting to be transported to the depths of the
African jungle.”52 All the same, this scene is unusual for presenting music-
making as labor: Ellington – framed in a dignified, composerly fashion –
plays the scene unassumingly, with his back to the camera, demonstrating
51 David Metzer, “Shadow Play: The Spiritual in Duke Ellington’s ‘Black and Tan Fantasy,’” Black
Music Research Journal 17 (Autumn 1997): 153.
52 Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), 341.
Figure 1.5 Alec Lovejoy and Edgar Connor, Black and Tan (RKO, 1929)
his composition on the piano and giving Whetsol practical instructions

for performance.
2. The comedy number: A pair of black movers set about repossessing
Ellington’s piano, but Fredi pays them off with a bottle of gin. As Gabbard
notes, the humor here is of a piece with the usual stereotypes of lazy,
ignorant, shiftless black working men; it is, in other words, completely in
line with contemporary entertainment codes.53 The comedians’ dialect,
mugging, low cunning, illiteracy, and grotesquely mismatched bod-
ies are all elements of variety/vaudeville entertainment characterization
(Figure 1.5).
3. The dance numbers: In the long central sequence of the film, Elling-
ton and his orchestra accompanies three dance acts, each with its own
customized novelty appeal. Together these acts create an arc of mount-
ing tension. First, a group of tuxedoed men (“The Five Hot Shots”) does
two dances in tightly synchronized formation as the orchestra plays The
Duke Steps Out and Black Beauty; as Fredi swoons in the wings, we see the
troupe’s dance again from her distorted point of view (through a prismatic
53 Gabbard, “Duke’s Place,” 163.

22 phil ford
lens). Next, Fredi dances wildly to The Cotton Club Stomp and collapses; the
club manager hustles her offstage and insists that the show go on. Finally,
the Cotton Club chorus girls hurriedly take Fredi’s place and dance to
the accompaniment of Flaming Youth. Their routine is interrupted when
Ellington, worried about Fredi and angered by the management’s callous-
ness, walks off stage and yells “close that curtain” as the chorines look
around, bewildered. Ellington is shown pointedly refusing to accept the
subservient position of the mere entertainer, and the moment the curtain
closes anticipates the alienation effects of revisionist musicals. When the
frenetic Flaming Youth breaks off, the ensuing confused hush reveals the
entertainment as an artifice that has been used to cover up a bleaker reality.
And yet the film has it both ways, as revisionist film musicals usually do,
making a show of unmasking entertainment while leaving its basic struc-
tures undisturbed. We get to experience the thrill of Harlem’s hot jazz and
see a little cheesecake, and then we get to feel we have transcended such
tawdry things.
The long dance sequence that precedes this moment of transcendence
is the ostentatiously arty filmic centerpiece of the production. When the
Hot Shots dance, the camera stubbornly points downward, its attention
less on the dancers themselves than on the shiny floor in which they are
reflected. The subsequent repetition of their dance through a prism is
a variation on this conceit. It was intended as an “artistic” touch of the
same sort as the touches of German Expressionist style in the montage
sequence of the film version of Yamekraw, which sets Harlem pianist James
P. Johnson’s own historical portrait of the Negro.54 But this scene in Black
and Tan also offers a novel variation on a perennial stylistic gesture of film
musical spectacle. In many film musicals (perhaps most notably in Fred
Astaire and Eleanor Powell’s famous pas de deux in Broadway Melody of
1940), we see the dancers’ flurried gestures picked out and magnified by
mirrored surfaces or some other means – think of the way the splashes in
Gene Kelly’s dance to “Singin’ in the Rain” mark his steps. In short, the
optical effects in Black and Tan are plausibly “art” but firmly in line with
entertainment practice. Likewise, when Fredi Washington dances herself
to death (an obvious nod to Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, Sacre du printemps),
we see a shot of her legs and crotch taken from beneath a transparent floor;
Klaus Stratemann suggests that this moment is another expressionist touch
that “increases the eerie atmosphere,” but we might just as easily see it as
54 Howland, Uptown, 91.

a novel variation on the kinds of crowd-pleasing shots we see in the more

frankly revue-like Bundle of Blues, another Ellington short from the same
period.55
4. The big finish: Black and Tan’s finale pays off with spectacle and
variety, offering us a chance to watch a dramatic death scene and an
exotic tableau of black religious folklore, and also to hear a complete
performance of the film’s eponymous hit number. The Hall Johnson Choir
and the members of Duke Ellington’s orchestra are gathered at Fredi’s
bedside, and we see looming chiaroscuro shadows of instruments and
waving hands held high as the choir sings “Same Train.” Fredi makes
her dying request to hear Black and Tan Fantasy once more. This closing
performance of the number omits Ellington’s piano solo but is careful
to work in the instrumental “stunts” that had been the record’s great
attraction – the sustained high B-flat, the whinny, etc. What is new is the
choir, which gives the music a more pronounced gospel tinge than we hear
in Ellington’s other recordings of the piece. And we are further treated to a
satisfyingly melodramatic ending as Fredi convulses with an unheard cry
and dies to a more drawn-out citation from the Chopin Marche funèbre.
Gabbard is troubled by this scene (as well as several others like it in
Bundle of Blues and Cabin in the Sky), as it seems to make a point of
cutting between the sophisticated Ellington and primitivist images of
African Americans:
The juxtaposing of sophisticated artists of the Harlem Renaissance with minstrel

stereotypes at the opening of the film is comparable to the moment in the middle
section when Cotton Club dancers clad primarily in animal feathers shimmy while
black men in tuxedos gracefully perform on shiny brass instruments. In the deathbed
scene, the “folkloric” view of African Americans as simple, rural, hymn-singing
Christians is layered over the urbane, profane sounds of the Ellington band.56
Students of modernism will recognize such abrupt juxtapositions of urban

modernity and folk archaism, artifice and nature. The chic Africanism of
interwar modernism played on the disjuncture between an archaic and
tribal Africa and modern America. Dudley Murphy, the director of Black
55 Stratemann, Day, 7.
56 Gabbard, “Duke’s Place,” 166. As is always the case in these films, and for reasons that I explore
in the conclusion of this essay, there is no consensus on whether such racial representations are
progressive and responsible. For a more positive interpretation of this scene, see Thomas
Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 207.
24 phil ford
and Tan who had collaborated with Fernand Léger on the avant-garde
film Ballet méchanique (1924), went on to direct The Emperor Jones (John
Krimsky and Gifford Cochran, Inc./United Artists, 1933), whose opening
scene effects a dissolve between an African drum circle and a circle shout at
a contemporary African American worship meeting.57 Modernist artists
have constantly sought a timeless folk essence within the forms of modern
art; as Daniel Albright has written, the “convergence of the artificial and
the natural is one of the great paradoxes of modernism.”58 We can see this
convergence not only in Ellington’s films, but also in some of the surviving
images of Jump for Joy, Ellington’s wartime anti-racist musical revue (from
1941) that was his most direct attempt to reconcile entertainment and
racial dignity.
The sudden and incongruous aura of spirituality that appears at the
end of Black and Tan opens the film out to a wider historical frame of
reference. In this image, the irruption of the archaic within the modern
constitutes a historical simultaneity that moves the story out from the
immediate context of nightclubs and tenements to the deep past of racial
memory. The black church did not only supply a rhetoric of prophetic
history, it also supplied the iconography of that history, and the spectacle
of religious rapture, whether in mourning or exaltation, was as much
a shorthand image for a larger history as the sweating bodies of the
laborers. The clearest expression of this in Ellington’s filmography comes
in the penultimate Symphony in Black episode, the “Hymn of Sorrow,”
in which a minister presides over a child’s funeral. After showing us the
mourners’ tear-stained faces, the camera pulls back and takes in the whole
church, with the minister, his bearded ancient face and great white mane
projecting the figure of an Old Testament prophet, standing over a tiny
coffin. The minister’s hands are crossed over his chest; slowly he raises
them above his head, and the mourners join him in solemn ecstasy. The
spectacle of a roomful of black hands raised heavenward was by this
time already well established in film as the sign for the African American
folk primitive. This device, amplified by shadowy high-contrast lighting,
is used not only in Symphony in Black and Black and Tan but also in
Yamekraw and King Vidor’s all-black musical Hallelujah! (MGM, 1929).
And like all these films, Symphony in Black uses an imagery of black
57 For a study of Murphy’s place in interwar “jazz modernism,” see James Donald, “Jazz
Modernism and Film Art: Dudley Murphy and Ballet méchanique,” Modernism/Modernity 16
(January 2009): 25–49.
58 Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), 242.
religious folklore in vivid contrast to one of strenuous modernity: “Hymn

of Sorrow” is immediately succeeded by “Harlem Rhythm,” a kinetic
collage of nightclubs and dancing bodies whose discontinuities and canted
angles suggest cubist abstraction.
Ellington’s appearance in Cabin in the Sky presents a scene of simi-
lar incongruity between folk primitivism and urban modernity. Indeed,
James Naremore suggests that such incongruities lay at the heart of director
Vincente Minnelli’s Africanist style.59 Cabin in the Sky mediates between
four pairs of terms: city and country; individual and the folk; modernity
and tradition; profane and sacred. The first term of each pair maps onto
every other, so that modernity comes to occupy a space that is essentially
profane and urban, and the modern subject becomes the pleasure-seeking,
irreligious individual at home only in the homeless condition of the mod-
ern city. Such is the perennial Other of reactionary populism; it is also the
picture of damnation that emerges in the Great Migration narratives of
race films like Blood of Jesus (Amegro Films/Sack Amusement Enterprises,
1941), in which migrants to the northern city must choose between God,
family, and tradition, on the one hand, and the lures of gambling, liquor,
loose women, dancing, and hot music on the other. Cabin in the Sky runs a
variation on these stories. A pious countrywoman prays for her husband,
Little Joe, after he has been shot in a craps game, and a troop of angels
arrives in time to prevent his soul from being carried off to Hell. However,
the Devil and his henchmen (including a scene-stealing Louis Armstrong)
continue to vie for his soul, and Little Joe falls from his reformed ways,
ending up at a nightclub in which the Ellington orchestra is performing.
This is the climax of the film, and it should be the moment where the film’s
structure of binary oppositions comes most clearly into focus. And yet, as
Gabbard and Naremore point out, this is the moment where this struc-
ture comes undone. When we arrive at the nightclub, writes Naremore,
“clearly, this is no smoky den of iniquity. It seems more like a showcase for
a famous orchestra, and the lovely collaboration among Ellington’s music,
Busby Berkeley’s choreography, and Minnelli’s camera crane amounts to
a kind of celebration.”60 The individual merges into the folk, the archaic
forms of folk community emerge from the flux of modernity, and the
profane spectacle of jitterbugging bodies is transformed into something
like a religious revival.
59 James Naremore, “Uptown Folk: Blackness and Entertainment in Cabin in the Sky,” in
Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 169–92.
60 Ibid., 182.
26 phil ford
Consider how this scene is shot. After a quick fanfare – which under-
scores an establishing shot of Ellington’s name prominent on the club
marquee – the camera pans down to street level as we hear the loping
vamp of “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” The figures on the street
are sharp-dressed young black men and women pairing up and sauntering
into the club in time to the music. The camera picks out a couple and
follows them to the doors, through which they disappear; others follow
them, with one man (breaking the fourth wall for a moment) beckoning
to the film’s audience to join them; and all this time, as our eye has been
beguiled by the action, another couple has been arguing, unnoticed, off
to one side of the frame. We notice them. He wants to go in, she thinks it
is late and makes to leave – but with a sudden pirouette she gives in and
they dance their way in through the front door. All of this is timed to the
music: the girl acquiesces in the first 4-measure (tonic) limb of the new
blues chorus, her change of mind reinforced with octave-doubled brass; a
long-awaited reverse-angle shot from within the club follows the couple
inside in the blues chorus’s second 4-measure limb, matching the music’s
feint to the subdominant to the camera’s change of perspective; and at the
final limb, the payoff of the blues’s AAB form, the camera cranes upward
to show the couple within a mass of synchronized dancing bodies, all
snapping fingers in time to the now-irresistible groove.
Throughout this scene, Minnelli’s camera, tracking Ellington’s music,
moves constantly between the individual and the crowd, narrowing in
and expanding outward again, picking out hip, cosmopolitan individuals
and merging them into a new kind of collectivity. And at the apex of
the motion outward, our eyes take in the crowd and the benevolently
patriarchal figure of Ellington, presiding over it all. Ellington is a master
of ceremonies for this reconstituted urban black folk, orchestrating the
crowd as well as his musicians. Ellington, famously, was the architect
of spaces within which individual musicians could express themselves;
this scene shows him to be a composer of a more abstract medium, the
human interaction that lies behind music-making. This is another part of
Ellington’s image as the exemplary Harlem Negro, one who at once fulfills
a line of historical development and midwifes its destiny. He is a figure
that can effect this scene’s reconciliation of the modern individual with
folk tradition. Ellington does not have to speak; he needs only to stand
there, resplendent in his white suit, hands moving in elegant conductors’
gestures to guide his musicians and listeners through the registers of black
historical experience. We have stomped the blues; now we go to church.
Lawrence Brown touches off the final dance number (“Goin’ Up”) with a
solo trombone “sermon” in call-and-response with the shouting crowd.

Here the timeless folk spirit encounters urban modernity, yet each frame
of historical reference, the modern and the archaic, retains its particularity
in the encounter.
African Americans were seen, both by themselves and by others, as
figures elementally bound to every stage of their development, walking a
road in which history followed them as a shadow. The essentialism of this
position meant that a hostile reading lay always ready at hand – the notion
that black people are essentially primitive, inwardly regressing back to a
state of African savagery whatever their outward affectation of civilized
manners. But as I have suggested, there was always a positive reading of
this narrative as well: that the most brilliant successes of the race carried
Africa at its core, and that modernity and racial roots are reflected in one
another, with the former the foreordained culmination of the latter.
The success of Obama’s image – an updated form of Ellington’s careful
self-stylization – prompts us to reflect that these are not only ways that
African Americans picture themselves. Such images are fully a part of
what Norman Mailer called the “dream life of the nation,” the collective
repertory of fantasy images that coalesce into movies.61 To be sure, as
Altman has noted, “Blacks [in 1920s films] were in no sense a part of the
American “we”; instead they represented a picturesque and mysterious
“they” living among us, a source of romance hardly differentiated from
the operetta version of aristocratic Europe.”62 Moving black people from
“they” to “we” is the cultural project that Obama and Ellington have in
common. In the representations I have been describing, the time-out-
of-time eternity in which African Americans are traditionally pictured
somehow opens up within the time of urban modernity and transforms
it. There is a hidden mythic dimension of modern history, and when we
find ourselves there, African Americans are its guardians and masters.
The image of the black body can be used to represent the American
people as history-bound subjects, and thus can be called upon at times
of political urgency, when progressives find themselves in need of such
representations. 2008 was one such time; the interwar era of the Popular
Front, in which Ellington’s films take part, was another. Though Ellington
was not involved with it, Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner
Bros., 1933) is a peerless document of the latter era and its hunger for
history, its need to think the present historically, and its attempts to
61 Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: Putnam, 1963), 38.
62 Altman, American Film Musical, 290.
28 phil ford
exercise the historical faculty. This film provides us with one last image
of historical blackness in which the sounding black body, the black voice,
does the crucial work of articulating a historical vision.
The final number of this film, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” is a
standout piece of what Michael Denning has called the cultural front,
meaning the left-wing bloc of cultural production to which Ellington
belonged.63 Berkeley used the entertainment codes I have described to
create a historical pageant of the American people from World War I to
the Depression. The lyrics of the chorus efficiently mark the modern man’s
stations of the cross: conscription and sacrifice in the Great War, labor and
suffering in peacetime, abandonment, betrayal, and dispossession. The
scene opens with Joan Blondell on the streets of a modern metropolis,
briskly tagged as such by the same imagery of urban modernity that
Black and Tan and Yamekraw use – a luxe pop version of Expressionist
perspectival distortion.64 Blondell offers a street bum a cigarette and begins
to speak the verse and chorus of the song, the camera tight on her, making
sure we listen to the story she tells.
Berkeley’s production numbers and Ray Heindorf’s arrangements are
built around the inflexible 32-bar lyric binary (aaba) forms of Harry
Warren and Al Dubin’s songs, which act as containers for spectacle. These
numbers are like egg cartons, with each stanza holding a single glittering
item of spectacle. So in the “Forgotten Man” number, the verse and first
chorus are presented as face-to-face storytelling. The next chorus is sung,
and this stanzaic container holds a crane shot that moves along the exterior
of a tenement whose windows frame the faces of abandoned women;
the next stanza contains a spectacle of soldiers marching off to war and
marching back wounded; the fourth stanza of the chorus shows the faces
of men in breadlines; and the final stanza is the big finish, a massive
Berkeleyesque tableau of soldiers and the unemployed, flanked by women
with imploring outstretched arms, and Blondell at the center, the orchestra
playing a grandiose fortissimo accompaniment swollen with chorus.
This story is not just a history – the recent history of the American
common man – but a story about history: the common man buffeted by
historical forces. Now, entertainment shows rather than tells, persuading
63 For a discussion of Ellington’s role in the cultural front, see Michael Denning, The Cultural
Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997),
309–19.
64 On luxe pop, see John Howland, “Hearing Luxe Pop: Jay Z, Isaac Hayes, and the Six Degrees of
Symphonic Soul,” in The Relentless Pursuit of Tone: Timbre and Popular Music, ed. Robert Fink,
Zachary Wallmark, and Mindy O’Brien (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
us through the faculties of the senses rather than reason. How then do
you show something like this? How do you make history palpable to the
senses? Films of the cultural front showed you the people; as Denning
writes, “The question of ‘representing’ the people – to depict and speak
for the people – lies at the center of the artistic and intellectual works of
the cultural front.”65 The visual means Berkeley finds for this is ingenious.
Here, he uses something similar to the architectural cutaway he used for the
naughty humor of the “Honeymoon Hotel” number from Footlight Parade
(Warner Bros., 1933). By contrast, the “Forgotten Man” production is built
around a dismal tenement that functions as an egg-carton container for
images of social types: the young widow, her face as pinched and drawn as
a Dorothea Lange photo, holding her child; the old widow in her rocking
chair, face slack with pain; the war hero vagrant, rousted on the street by
a thuggish cop with a face like a slab of beef. Social types, arrayed at any
given moment of time, describe a synchronic axis and can be seen.66 The
other axis, of time, can be heard – and the voice of history is Etta Moten, a
raced voice, comparable in its role and gravity to Paul Robeson’s in Ballad
for Americans (1939).67 Moten’s image, like Ellington’s, is not inflected
by code inherited from minstrelsy, but marks a new entertainment
image – the image of blackness taking the form and voice of prophecy,
making history visible and audible in a single spectacular moment.
I began this essay by contrasting the images of Ellington and Louis
Armstrong, somewhat to Ellington’s advantage. What is left of Armstrong
in the dream life of the nation is a crude, ghosted retinal after-image: a
trumpet, a gravelly voice singing “What a Wonderful World,” and a huge
65 Denning, Cultural Front, 125.

66 Our Daily Bread, a New Deal-era film entertainment extraordinarily blunt in its expression of
collectivist ideology, assembles its stock social types (the hustling Brooklyn Jew, the émigré
German musician, the Swedish Minnesotan farmer, etc.) in order to render a visual
representation of that unrepresentable abstraction, society. King Vidor, dir., Our Daily Bread
(orig. King Vidor Productions/United Artists, 1934), Image Entertainment, 2005, DVD.
67 Robeson is perhaps the only entertainer whose interwar career occupies roughly the same place
as Ellington’s – a black entertainer whose media image is built around an axis of racial and
artistic dignity. But while Ellington remains mute in most of his film appearances, Robeson
was represented by his voice. Ballad for Americans is a historical pageant, and a kind of
auditory film, in which Robeson’s voice represents America itself in its multiple manifestations;
in the less well-known film Native Land, Robeson is the unseen narrator, a speaking (and
sometimes singing) voice that traces invisible lines of history and society. See Lisa Barg, “Paul
Robeson’s Ballad for Americans: Race and the Cultural Politics of ‘People’s Music,’” Journal of
the Society for American Music 2 (2008): 27–70; Kevin Jack Hagopian, “‘You Know Who I Am!’:
Paul Robeson’s Ballad for Americans and the Paradox of the Double V in American Popular
Culture,” in Paul Robeson: Essays on His Life and Legacy, ed. Joseph Dorinson and William
Pencak (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 167–79.
30 phil ford
ingratiating smile. As Ralph Ellison noted, for postwar bebop musicians

Armstrong stood as a cautionary example of the black artist who chose
to inhabit one of the clownish roles that lay, like boxes on a shelf, as
ready containers for racial identity. But Ellison defends Armstrong’s role
as clown by suggesting that bebop’s contrary stance of resistance was just
another degrading role for black artists to play for white audiences. Indeed,
he goes further. He suggests, disquietingly, that no one who performs for
an audience can escape being an entertainer: “Whatever his style, the
performing artist remains an entertainer, even a Heifetz, Rubinstein or
young Glenn Gould.”68 Even Heifetz and Gould had images. Armstrong,
at least, could wriggle free of his.
Ellison believed that a clown’s mask allows its wearer to slip through
the confinements of any ready-made identity. But I am not so sure. To
entertain is to don a mask, and we can never be sure that the audience
has not mistaken the mask for its wearer. Comedian Dave Chappelle’s
decision to walk away from his television career in 2006 suggests that
he had discovered this truth for himself. Chappelle’s Show played racial
stereotypes for laughs, inflating them to preposterous size and letting them
collapse under their own weight. But Chappelle stopped taping the show
when he heard a white crew member laughing just a little too hard at
a sketch in which he and rapper Mos Def played blackface minstrels. It
turned out that it was still possible for laughter at the demolition of an
entertainment image to become laughter at the image itself. There is no
practical way to keep these things separate: an image of an image is still
an image, just as a progressive image – blackness as history, the exemplary
African American as the embodiment of that history – is, in the end, just
another image, albeit a more flattering one. The image of the historical
Negro was like a Magic Eye picture, a two-dimensional pattern that gives
the illusion of three dimensions; it did not actually supply the missing
third dimension. You cannot use stereotypes to transcend stereotypes;
you can only offer better ones. But my repeated invocation of Obama
might at least give a sense of what can be at stake in such a contest.
Intellectuals deplore the blunt stupidity of images and long for alterna-
tives. They want films to have characters drawn with a depth and realism
that might do justice to the irreducible complexity of individual human
beings, or they want to see laid bare the social forces that shape group
identities. The writer to whom Ellington expressed his desire to “give an
68 Ralph Ellison, “On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed.
John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 260.
American audience entertainment without compromising the dignity of

the Negro people” ended his article by calling for a new social realism
in entertainment: “There will be fewer generalized gin-guzzling, homici-
dal maniacs, and more understanding of rotten socio-economic condi-
tions which give rise to neurotic escapists, compensating for overwrought
nerves.”69 But Ellington never created this kind of worthy, dull art. He did
not forswear images, and neither did he forswear the very real power that
comes of fashioning them. That power is the ability to intervene in the
Dream Life, to confront malevolent images, oppose them with your own,
and draw their sting. This is a potent kind of political power – perhaps the
most powerful political intervention an artist can make. The prophetic
images that Ellington manipulated ended up helping to get Obama elected,
after all. To forswear image-making, to abandon entertainment, is to leave
the field of battle, and Ellington, gentlemanly as he was, did not shrink
from this fight.
69 Duke Ellington as quoted in Edward Murrow, “Duke Ellington on Gershwin’s ‘Porgy,’” in

Tucker, Reader, 117.
2 Marketing to the Middlebrow: Reconsidering
Ellingtonia, the Legacy of Early Ellington
Criticism, and the Idea of a “Serious” Jazz
Composer
john howland
In 2000, JazzTimes sought to trace the history of the canonization of Louis

Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings from the 1920s. Their
search led to an interview with George Avakian, who at age twenty-one
for Columbia Records initiated the first commercial album reissues of long
unavailable back-catalog recordings from pre-Swing era jazz.1 Following
the model of the Avakian-produced 1940 compilation album, King Louis,
as well as this “Hot Jazz Classics” album series, the early and mid-1940s
recording industry witnessed a range of compilation album reissues, many
of which aimed to document “Jazz as It Should Be Played,” to borrow the
title of the second album – this time by Bix Beiderbecke – in the “Hot
Jazz Classics” series, which itself was framed around a tag-line touting “re-
issues of the original records that made jazz history.”2 As the series name,
the Beiderbecke album title, and the focus on a curated handful of top
artists imply, these commerical reissue efforts involved the self-conscious
canon formation of a jazz “classics” repertory, a stylistic agenda on what
“hot jazz” was and how it should be played, and a commercial recording
movement that went hand-in-glove with a period revival of early jazz
performance styles overlapping in near tandem with the modern Swing
era (and soon early bebop). In light of the Duke Ellington orchestra’s
long popularity for their recordings and live engagements, as well as their
broad presence in films, on the radio, and at such prestigious venues
as Carnegie Hall (1943 forward), it should be no surprise that the late
1920s and early to mid-1930s recording catalog of Ellington’s music was
quickly repackaged as part of this jazz “classics” commercial canonization
movement.
1 George Avakian, “The First Jazz Reissue Program,” JazzTimes, October 2000, http://jazztimes
.com/articles/20273-the-first-jazz-reissue-program%20%3E (accessed 9 May 2016). Louis
Armstrong, King Louis, Columbia Records C-28, 1940, 78-rpm album. Many thanks to Ricky
Riccardi and Steven Lasker for helpful information on this series.
2 Bix Beiderbecke, Jazz as It Should Be Played by Bix Beiderbecke, Columbia Records C-29, 1940,
32 78-rpm album.
Marketing to the Middlebrow 33
Ellington’s press reception history and his public-relations promotional

copy from the late 1920s to early 1940s did in fact prove to be ideal material
for jazz proponents to promote a relatively new popular notion of jazz
“classics.” Specifically, Ellington’s long-cultivated image as a musical and
cultural sophisticate enabled the era’s most prodigious cultural elevation
project in efforts to associate areas of jazz performance and composi-
tion with the period’s popular-culture conception of the elevated status
and cultural aura of classical music. Among the more prominent images
of this elevated aura came from the widely popular “longhair” classical
programming of Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. I
reference midcentury “longhair” discourse here both figuratively, in the
class-hierarchy sense (meaning devotees and proponents of the highbrow
arts, particularly classical music), and literally, in the imagery and carica-
tures of the conductor’s wild, flowing white mane when pursuing his art.3
As I argue in this chapter, many areas of these jazz–classical associative
juxtapositions in the press and Ellington’s promotional materials closely
engage with the rhetoric and practices of emergent trends in interwar
middlebrow culture. The popular press, promotional copy, and media
imagery that cultivated the widely held interwar notion of Duke Elling-
ton, the “serious” jazz composer, clearly document how deeply entwined
this 1930s conception is with interwar middlebrow culture in the U.S.A.
and U.K. This chapter both outlines this argument and explores what
implications this framing has for understanding Ellington in this era – or,
rather, the idea of a serious jazz composer in its contemporary interwar
context.
As Joseph Horowitz and Joan Shelley Rubin both observe,4 the jaun-
diced “highbrow” critical view of mass culture at midcentury, the Ameri-
can anti-intellectual tradition, and especially interwar attempts at democ-
ratizing high culture for the masses, had significant roots in the theories
of the Frankfurt School (particularly the writings of Theodor Adorno
and Leo Lowenthal). As Horowitz notes, by the mid-1940s, this crit-
icism had begun to “filter down from the ivory tower toward mass-
circulation newspapers and magazines”5 by way of the essays of Clement
3 Google “Toscanini caricature” to see a wealth of related images.

4 Joseph Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and
Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1987), and Joan Shelley
Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1992).
5 Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 243. During this period, the Frankfurt School theorists
were living in exile on the Columbia University campus in New York.
34 john howland
Greenberg, Dwight Macdonald, Russell Lynes, and others.6 While this

criticism first surfaced just after World War II, the most influential essay
on this subject, Dwight Macdonald’s “Masscult and Midcult,” was pub-
lished in 1960.7 Macdonald had written on both mass and middlebrow
culture since the early 1950s, but this particular article marked the culmi-
nation of his theories on the complex relations between American cultural
strata and contemporary mass culture in the post-World War II era. Of
particular interest to this current chapter are Macdonald’s concerns about
commercial transferences of highbrow cultural aura to middlebrow cul-
tural expressions. In the context of critiquing the middlebrow aesthetics of
Life magazine, Macdonald in a sense echoes Walter Benjamin’s (Frankfurt
School) notions of “aura” in art8 when he notes:
Life is a typical homogenized [middlebrow] magazine . . . The same issue will present
a serious exposition of atomic energy followed by a disquisition on Rita Hayworth’s
love life; photos of starving children . . . in Calcutta and of sleek models wearing
adhesive brassieres . . . nine color pages of Renoir paintings followed by a roller-
skating horse; a cover announcement [prominently advertises,] in the same size
type[,] two features: “A New Foreign Policy,” . . . and “Kerima: Her Marathon Kiss
Is a Movie Sensation.” Somehow these scramblings together seem to work all one
way, degrading the serious rather than elevating the frivolous. Defenders of our
Masscult society [i.e., popular culture] . . . see phenomena like Life as inspiring
attempts at popular education – just think, nine pages of Renoirs! but that roller-
skating horse comes along, and the final impression is that both Renoir and the
horse were talented.9
Such “homogenized . . . scramblings” of markers for the “serious,” as well

as efforts at “elevating the frivolous” (whether or not one agrees on the
success of this), are readily identified in the packaging and texts of two
key “jazz classics” albums by Ellington in the mid-1940s. The first, a
two-volume, sixteen-track Brunswick Records release, Ellingtonia: A Col-
lection of Distinctive Recordings Played by Duke Ellington, stands apart
from the period’s “jazz classics” compilation albums in a number of ways.
Brunswick Records identifies these releases as part of their “Collectors’
6 A wonderful document of this critical legacy is the anthology Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957).
7 Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” part 1, Partisan Review 27 (Spring 1960): 203–33,
and part 2, Partisan Review 27 (Fall 1960): 589–631.
8 The essay that is the source of this idea was originally published in 1936, but has been reprinted
separately as Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New
York: Penguin, 2008), Kindle e-book.
9 Macdonald, “Masscult,” Part 1, 212–13.
Figure 2.1 The red-velvet cover and accompanying liner-note booklet to the 1943
Brunswick Records 78-rpm album, Ellingtonia, vol. 1, B1000
Series.” The April 1943 first volume appears in a red velvet-clad fabric
cover with a distinctive black-and-red graphic paper label affixed to the
front. (See Figure 2.1.) Nothing says sophisticated like red velvet; I know
of no other 1940s albums with such a cover, whether jazz, popular, or clas-
sical. The second volume, released June 1944, sports a green velvet-clad
cover.10 The other two artists in the Brunswick series are cornetist Red
Nichols and boogie-woogie pianist Pine Top Smith, but their releases – and
the later series releases I have seen – do not include the velvet treatment,
nor anything as extravagant as the six-page detailed Ellingtonia liner-note
booklet written by Dave Dexter, Jr. A distinctive compliment to the velvet
covers is the subtle, iconic, black-silhouette graphic of what appears to
be a concert-style pianist – with both face and clothes in black, possibly
implying a tuxedoed African American? – performing “seriously” (leaning
10 Duke Ellington, Ellingtonia: A Collection of Distinctive Recordings Played by Duke Ellington,

vols. 1 (released April 1943) and 2 (released June 1944), Brunswick B-1000 and B-1011,
78-rpm album sets.
36 john howland
forward in musical concentration and without the jazzed-entertainment

histrionics depicted in many other period jazz-pianist album graphics,
including some of Ellington’s). The pianist is seated at a concert-length
grand piano (an “elevated” version of the instrument not normally asso-
ciated with jazz bands). This album further marks one of the earliest
high-profile uses of the term “Ellingtonia,” which provides an authorial
air of “works” by a single artist worthy of collecting and presenting in a
compilation album. It speaks to the idea of a “legacy” – artistic, docu-
mentary, and worthy of scholarship – as “Ellingtonia” has been used ever
since.
A second – and even more unusual – jazz album by Ellington is the
1946 RCA Black, Brown and Beige: A Duke Ellington Tone Parallel to the
American Negro release which offers excerpts from his extended concert
work of the same name that he premiered in 1943 at Carnegie Hall. The
album was released in both hard and soft covers, with variations on the
cover graphics and accompanying texts. Figure 2.2 presents the soft-cover
version, both front and back.11 One finds a collage of graphics and pho-
tograph materials with an artful array of contrasting block colors and
color fades. There is the central image of the dapper, sophisticated Duke
at work (performance) in dark evening wear with French cuffs and cuf-
flinks set above the collage graphic of photographed piano keys superim-
posed on a brown-to-beige (semi?) concert grand piano, all superimposed
over an iconic shot of Carnegie Hall’s exterior. The album cover proudly
announces that this is an “RCA Victor Showpiece.” The complimentary
“Jazz Immortal” back cover shows the sophisticated Ellington at leisure
in a full-color photograph of him lounging on a royal purple couch in a
golden-yellow smoking jacket (with rust-colored fuzzy slippers!), sitting
at attention while listening to his own 1943 A Duke Ellington Panorama
album set on a stylish, Art Deco-type 1940s entertainment console.12 His
“leisure” presentation is the perfect picture of 1940s Hollywood glamor.
This outer-cover graphic framing contrasts notably with the more tradi-
tionally jazz-centric, blue-black head shots of his performing musicians
that surround the inside-cover liner notes, as well as the storybook- (or
Works Progress Administration-) style African American history images
seen on these pages (graphics which emphasize black-themed historical
stereotypes of slavery, religion, community, dreaming, modernity, etc.).
11 Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige: A Duke Ellington Tone Parallel to the American Negro,
RCA DC39 (hard cover) and SP-9 (soft cover), 1946, 78-rpm album set.
12 Duke Ellington, A Duke Ellington Panorama, Victor P-138, 1943, 78-rpm album set.
Figure 2.2 The front and back covers of the 1946 78-rpm album, Black, Brown and
Beige, SP-9 (soft cover)
38 john howland
This deluxe packaging and graphic-offsetting of Ellington from then-

common models of jazz imagery on album covers (for example, the influ-
ential 1940s jazz album cover graphics of David Stone Martin) and the
press and other media stands out quite distinctly from the other “jazz clas-
sics” albums of the day. The accompanying texts to both albums work in
tandem with their graphics to hit home the jazz–classical aura transference
notions that characterize this elevated “jazz classics” packaging. Glancing
through the liner notes to Ellingtonia, vol. 1, one sees such phrases as: “most
genuinely talented individual personality in the entire jazz realm”; “he felt
that the existing musical culture (the European manner, of course) would
stifle . . . his talents”; “he learned to compose and orchestrate music just
as many other truly great [i.e., classical] artists have done, by experimen-
tation and through practical experience”; “Ellington’s music is American
music . . . in the American idiom, untouched by cheap and bawdy Tin
Pan Alley Standards or the equally odorous European touch”; “Black and
Tan Fantasy . . . Another immortal piece of Ellingtonia”; etc. The track-by-
track notes balance the careful accounting of facts with commentary on
the entertainment value of aspects of the music, the quality of the music
as the highest jazz, and routine references to formal construction. Volume
2 (unfortunately I do not have this release’s liner notes) reflects the latter
Ellingtonia trope through its unusual inclusion of the two-part “extended”
compositions, Creole Rhapsody and Tiger Rag, thus further emphasizing
Ellington the “serious” jazz composer. Here and throughout this essay, I
emphasize the use of “serious” as a common period synonym for elevated
culture and art. In this era, there are a wealth of parallel words for class
hierachy notions of serious, sophisticated, etc., but their gist is typically
based on a judgmental essentialism that juxtaposes an elevated notion of
Art (European) and “frivolous” commercial entertainment (American).
One interesting aspect with the interwar elevated promotion of Ellington
is the routine promotional insistence on having it both ways – Ellington
is said to represent serious but playful artful entertainment. This have-it-
both-ways balance is inherently middlebrow. The image juxtaposition of a
Carnegie Hall Jazz Immortal and the glamorous Hollywood-style matinee
idol on the purple couch captures this well. (And the liner notes to the
album present a similar have-it-both-ways, art–entertainment balance.)
The Avakian/Columbia “jazz classics” releases – which included two
Ellington13 albums – are part of a more generalized 1940s critical push by
13 Duke Ellington, The Duke (released November 1940), no. 5 in the “Jazz Classics” series,
Columbia C-38, and Ellington Special (released June 1947), no. 14 in the ”Jazz Classics” series,
Columbia C-127, both 78-rpm album sets.
jazz proponents towards promoting the artistry of hot (improvised) jazz,

and more specifically jazz as a distinctly American (and specifically African
American indebted) art form. By the latter, it was meant that hot jazz was
not merely a frivolous American commercial entertainment for moving
your feet, but it could also be seen as non-European musical artistry
that at its best could involve an intellectual, artistic sophistication for the
brain. (This dual mind-versus-body/art-versus-entertainment aesthetic
dichotomy has a long European and American history that is beyond
the scope of this essay.) By contrast, the two aforementioned Ellington
releases encapsulate a different – and yet higher – level of cultural and
racial elevation in midcentury American popular culture discourse. In
this essay, I am not interested in debating whether or not Ellington’s
musical sophistication was middlebrow. Rather, I am interested in its
reception and the widespread promotion of the idea of this sophistication
through the framing of middlebrow cultural rhetoric and discourse. I am
interested in the aura of middlebrow sophistication in this image and its
promotional practice.
Midcentury Middlebrow
While the middlebrow has become a sizable topic in cultural studies,14 it

remains under-researched in music scholarship. Like “popular” and “clas-
sical” music, middlebrow music culture should not be essentialized too
readily. There is ample and diverse midcentury discourse on middlebrow
culture by public intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald, Russell Lynes,
and others. Lynes humorously divided middlebrows into four types with
different ambitions and habits.15 By contrast, as noted, some figures like
Macdonald lumped middlebrows into a single troublesome category that
is determined centrally by cultural “homogenization” trends. For such
critics, their concern lay centrally with the production and dissemination
of democratic, inclusive middlebrow ideals and their relative intrusions
into – or proximity to – the formerly restrictive and exclusive domains
of highbrow culture. As noted, midcentury popular-press comparisons of
Ellington to classical composers were often meant to invoke a degree
of cultural aura transference, by elevating the image of Ellington rather
than the composers he was compared to. Similar popular-/high-culture
14 See, for example, the extensive bibliography of the Middlebrow Network, www
.middlebrow-network.com/Bibliography.aspx (accessed 18 May 2016)
15 Russell Lynes, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” Harper’s, February 1949, 12–28.
40 john howland
juxtapositions were worrisome to midcentury critics of the middlebrow,

who – to again recall Macdonald – took aim at media like Life magazine,
which “scramble[d] together” the cultural strata of the brows. This not
said to denigrate Ellington’s image, but to provide added perspective on
midcentury modes of high-low image construction in the popular sphere.
In examining the interwar construction of this notion of a ”serious” jazz
composer, there is an undeniable relation to period middlebrow concep-
tions of the elevated “Great Composer” – or, in this case, the idea of a “hot
Bach,” as Ellington was once famously called in an extended 1944 New
Yorker profile article. Like a great amount of Ellington press in this era, this
chapter includes many examples of mixed-class, mixed art/entertainment
rhetoric, and in a manner that closely echoes the aforementioned con-
temporaneous Ellingtonia “jazz classics” albums.16
The middlebrow has been somewhat of a career-threatening third rail
in art and music discourse of much of the twentieth century. I use “third
rail” here as a metaphor – with reference to the dangerous electric third
rail of commuter trains – for how a postwar middlebrow characterization
became controversial enough in certain circles that it could render the
legacies of certain artists as somehow “untouchable” or irredeemable. The
degraded middlebrow invariably suffered in artistic assessments against
the best of both art and popular entertainment. (Keep in mind that Amer-
ica had begun to appreciate its talents in the entertaining arts – or what
Gilbert Seldes called the “lively arts” – during the interwar era.) To aspire
to both spheres risked being seen as naive, hackneyed, hopelessly aspi-
rational, or commercially pandering on the art extreme, or drearily pre-
tentious on the entertainment side. That said, if one can step back from
the heated opinions of interwar and midcentury brow discourse, from a
present-day perspective the example of Ellington’s image presents a fasci-
nating study of both this earlier era’s dialectical negotiations between art
and entertainment, and the interwar American penchant for glamorous,
sophisticated, or artful entertainments. One need only look as far as the
1930s RKO film musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to recog-
nize one key period for such an artful entertainment aesthetic, which in
this case involved a potent mixture of tuxedos, ballroom gowns, lavish
Art Deco stage sets, and jazz (or at least jazzy syncopation), all in mixed
16 Richard Boyer, “Profiles: The Hot Bach,” part 1 (24 June), part 2 (1 July), and part 3 (8 July),
The New Yorker (1944), www.newyorker.com/magazine/1944/06/24/the-hot-bach-i, www
.newyorker.com/magazine/1944/07/01/the-hot-bach-ii, and www.newyorker.com/magazine/
1944/07/08/the-hot-bach-iii (accessed 18 May 2016)
combinations with snappy American street slang, the moneyed classes

mingling with common folk (often with cases of mistaken identity),
lushly scored orchestral ballroom music juxtaposed against swing-style
jazz, elegant ballroom footwork set against African American-derived
tap dance, and so forth.17 This interwar popular-culture aesthetic thrives
on sustained high-middle-low stylistic, musical, and class juxtapositions,
but above all its midcentury middlebrow core lies in the sophisticated,
glamorous presentation of popular entertainment idioms through both
mixed-class and mixed-race image presentations and often lavish (or at
least more-complex-than-usual) production-style arrangements.
One key root to this luxe entertainment aesthetic lies in the 1920s
popular idiom of symphonic jazz, a musical arranging aesthetic that was
most widely associated with the hugely successful orchestra of the white
bandleader, Paul Whiteman, but this general stylistic aesthetic was a signif-
icant presence in the lush, jazzy big-band-plus-strings mainstream sound
of certain popular music, musical theater, the variety shows of the deluxe
movie palaces, and film music of the late 1920s through 1950s. In sum,
symphonic jazz was the foundation for the sound of the deluxe arrang-
ing and instrumentation of much interwar and midcentury traditional
pop. As I have noted extensively elsewhere, and specifically in relation
to considerations of Ellington’s concert jazz works, under the sustained
stylistic and class-marker juxtapositions of symphonic jazz, the “jazz” of
symphonic jazz specifically paralleled 1920s journalistic uses of the term
as both an adjective and verb to imply a sense of mildly irreverent and
playful mixtures of white and black, high and low, and popular and cul-
turally elevated musics.18 Alternately, the so-called symphonic aspects of
this idiom specifically referenced the music’s heightened theatricality and
stylistic significations, its comparatively complex formal structures, and
especially its so-called “sophisticated” introductions, interludes and codas,
its unexpected modulations and dramatic cadenzas, and its emphasis on
orchestrational, textural, and stylistic variety. While these “pretentious”
attributes provided ideal targets in purist proponents of jazz, particularly
because of this idiom’s culturally “homogenizing” middlebrow commer-
cialism, the great achievement of the Whiteman symphonic jazz formula
was its skill in bridging urban entertainment styles and the aspirational
17 See Todd Decker, Music Makes Me: Fred Astaire and Jazz (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011).
18 See, for example, Howland, Uptown, and John Howland, “Between the Muses and the Masses:
Symphonic Jazz, ‘Glorified’ Entertainment, and the Rise of the American Musical Middlebrow,
1920–1944” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2002).
42 john howland
consumer interests of middle class America. This formula’s basis in broadly

familiar characteristic scoring effects and the idiom’s overall veneer of
sophistication proved a very powerful means of making jazz-related music
respectable to the American white middle class. Such middlebrow, aspira-
tional musical trends, though, were manifest in a variety of ways, including
most prominently the new mass marketing of classical music (e.g., with
Toscanini and the NBC Symphony), but they were also in many other
entertainment traditions.
Interwar film musicals again provide an ideal example of such enter-
tainment trends, and not the least because of their frequent symphonic
jazz-derived scoring practices. For example, this same high-low entertain-
ment aesthetic formed the narrative framing of numerous “gold-digger”
musicals and musical films of the late 1920s and early 1930s.19 The com-
mon narrative outline of this entertainment genre is equally reflective of
some of the basic elements present in the contemporary popular myths
concerning the highbrow reception of symphonic jazz: high society (both
highbrows and blue bloods) will be morally shocked that their ranks
have been broken by some smart-mouthed, street-wise (“red-blooded”)
Broadway hoofer or songstress (who they presume merely wants to profit
monetarily and socially from their attentions); the stuffed-shirts will lose
a bit of their stuffing with a little bit of lowbrow fun; and some lowbrow
minor character will do his best to pass in society but something in his
vernacular demeanor or a slang turn of phrase will trip him up. In the end,
after the comedy of errors has worked its natural course, a few members
of Society will loosen up and learn the pleasures of slumming through
their mingling with the “common” folk. Notice, however, that the central
theme here is one of the high being brought down to the level of the
low (or to the level of the common people), not the other way around.
Here is the culturally marginalized, no-man’s land of middlebrowism –
a pejorative characterization coined by midcentury white cultural critics
as a means to describe the pervasive hybridization of mass and highbrow
cultures between World Wars One and Two. What specifically concerned
these critics (Macdonald, Lynes, et al.) was that middlebrowism had come
to occupy such a major part of American culture in this period. Moreover,
as noted, these critics had come to see such territorial encroachments as
19 The popular backstage-comedy theme that defined a “gold digger” as a stage-world

opportunist was first introduced on Broadway in the 1919 comedy The Gold Digger. This play
was transformed into film by Warner Brothers on several occasions, most famously in the
landmark film musical, Gold Diggers of 1933 and the Gold Diggers of 1935.
major threats to highbrow cultural authority and the culturally privileged

positions of both the contemporary avant garde and the traditional art
canons.
Many historical and musicological accounts of American musical cul-
ture from World War I to midcentury rely upon a seemingly rigid generic
delineation between popular music (still including jazz at least until the
late 1940s) and classical music. However, these “accepted” discourses tend
to marginalize a great deal of the cross-fertilization that occurred between
all strata of American musical life during this period, and this is the very
same cultural territory inhabited by the symphonic jazz idiom. The basic
hypothesis that interwar American musical culture is centrally defined by
its myriad of culturally democratizing activities is significantly supported
by the evidence of the era’s musical trade magazines, such as Metronome
and Down Beat. Present-day histories of interwar jazz might give the
impression that both these periodicals were solely devoted to coverage of
jazz and swing. However, in the 1930s and early 1940s, both magazines
were committed to addressing a large cross-section of American musical
activities. The front-page title banner of Down Beat, for instance, proudly
proclaimed that its coverage extended to “Ballroom, Cafe, Radio, Studio,
Symphony and Theater” for its first several years of operation in the 1930s.
Notice that “jazz” (whatever music that term referenced, from sweet to
hot) is not even mentioned. As might be surmised from this logo, these
magazines often closely reported and commented on the doings of such
popular conductors as Leopold Stokowski and Toscanini (the world of
American symphonic music, at least in this popular frame). Both mag-
azines were particularly interested in stylistic border crossings and the
cultivation of performances of distinctively “American” music, much of
which stylistically fell in or near the symphonic jazz idiom. This interest
in cultural border crossing, for instance, can be noticed in such articles
as “Does a Highbrow Have to Step Down in the Movies? Why Stokowski
Turned to Hollywood” (on Stokowski’s work on the film 100 Men and a
Girl) and “Toscanini a ‘Bring-Down’ to American Composers” (in addi-
tion to repeating the commonly voiced critique of Toscanini’s “lack of
interest in American efforts,” this latter article attacks the conductor’s
extreme popularity and his lush interpretive style, proclaiming him “the
Rhodes of rhapsodic music”20 ).
There has been surprising little research attention given to the com-
plex middlebrow interactions between radio, mass marketing, and the
20 Both from Down Beat (November 1937): 13.

44 john howland
culture of classical music in the interwar era. One notable exception is

Joseph Horowitz’s book Understanding Toscanini, which contains impor-
tant examinations of the nexus of modern media, middlebrowism and
the culture of classical music in America.21 As mentioned, a number of
cultural and literary historians have recently taken up the quest to redraw
and examine the imposed boundaries in American society between high
Art and popular, mass and/or vernacular culture. A primary inspira-
tion for such studies has often been Lawrence Levine’s 1988 book, High-
brow/Lowbrow, an engaging account of the sacralization of high culture
and the parallel emergence of American cultural hierarchies in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.22 An important extension of
Levine’s work can be seen in Joan Shelley Rubin’s equally influential
book, The Making of Middlebrow Culture.23 This latter study details the
further stratification of American culture across the interwar era and
explores the later implications of the cultural trends that Levine first
articulated. Through her examination of the rise of such institutions and
phenomena as the Book-of-the-Month Club, journalistic reviews of new
books, the American middle-class desire for self-education and cultural
self-improvement (and the complementary publishing trend for creating
“outlines” of specialized knowledge), as well as her attention to the ide-
ologies behind the popularity of great book lists and book programs on
commercial radio, Rubin uncovers the “unjustly neglected phenomenon
of . . . the emergence of American middlebrow culture”24 in the 1920s
through 1940s.
For Macdonald and his midcentury highbrow critical peers, the most
disconcerting manifestations of this cultural democratization lay in the
market-driven proliferation of inexpensive copies of canonic art works
(particularly the midcentury boom in “quality” paperbacks, books of col-
lected art reproductions, and the phenomenal sales success of classical
records25 ) as well as in the era’s boom in institutions for the arts (such as
the multitude of symphony orchestras Macdonald notes had been estab-
lished for “every city of 50,000”). In highbrow critical circles, these phe-
nomena were not the subjects of praise. As the critic Louis Menand noted
more recently, for the Greenberg/Macdonald camp, it was “as though
mediocrity, or even entertainment, were a virus” eating away at American
21 Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini.

22 Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
23 Rubin, Making of Middlebrow. 24 Ibid., xi. 25 Macdonald, “Masscult,” Part 1, 211.
highbrow culture. Menand also aptly captures the essential nature of Mac-
donald’s cultural stance when he observes that to Macdonald, middlebrow
culture was essentially seen to be “kitsch for educated people.”26
In Macdonald’s opinion, the mass marketing of inexpensive copies of
canonic masterworks generally led the layman to a rather confused or
misguided reception of high art – “it is one thing to bring High Culture to
a wider audience without change, and another to ‘popularize’ it by sales
talk . . . or by hoking it up as in Stokowski’s lifelong struggle to assimilate
Bach to Tchaikowsky.”27 Thus, for Macdonald, rather than having a posi-
tive effect, this trend was a significant limiting factor for contemporary art
culture: “the quality paperbacks sell mostly the Big Names . . . The records
and . . . orchestras play Mozart and Stravinsky [an accessible modernist]
rather than Elliott Carter. The Art museums show mostly old masters or
new masters like Matisse, with a Jackson Pollack if they are daring,” etc.28
By contrast, the primary manifestations of cultural democratization in
the world of music, as Joseph Horowitz amply demonstrates, included the
Toscanini cult, the music appreciation “racket” (Virgil Thomson’s charac-
terization), and a diversity of related broad cultural efforts at populariza-
tion of a frozen repertory of “nineteenth-century [European] warhorses
[that] were recycled to amass a primer for radio-era listeners.”29 To Mac-
donald and his counterparts in the musical community, these trends lay at
the heart of the dreaded middlebrow intrusions into high musical culture.
Such mass-marketing of cultural monuments reached an unprece-
dented level of popularity in the interwar era. As Joan Rubin illustrates,
a significant part of this trend was tied to the era’s great interest in cul-
tural “self-education,” whereby individuals hoped (and were promised
by advertisers) that they could achieve cultural self-improvement for the
betterment of their social, intellectual or conversational prowess.30 Obvi-
ously, short-cuts were offered to attain such ends, thus the rise of abridged
or popularized versions of the classics. These trends included such phe-
nomena as Orson Welles’s popularizations of Shakespeare’s plays, abridged
productions and excerpts from the classics of literature and drama on radio
and television, Book-of-the-Month Club offers for album sets devoted to
26 Louis Menand, “Culture Club: The Short, Happy Life of the American Highbrow,” The New
Yorker, 15 October 2001, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/10/15/culture-club (accessed
18 May 2016)
27 Macdonald, “Masscult,” Part 2, 615n7. 28 Ibid., 616.
29 Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 262.
30 See especially Rubin, “Self, Culture, and Self-Culture in America,” in Rubin, Making of
Middlebrow, 133.
46 john howland
selections from the “best” of the classical repertory, as well as numerous

compilations, “great work” lists, guides and outlines to the “masterworks,”
etc.
In music, such middlebrow trends for popularizing the “classics” were
expressed both through abridged versions of popular canonic works and
jazzed/fox-trot versions of classical melodies, as well as a diversity of great
works lists, including Whiteman’s own Music for the Millions, a “how to”
guide for introducing the classics to the layman.31 One of the more outra-
geous projects in the democratization of the classical canon, for instance,
was a radio program directed by the conductor Andre Kostelanetz. In
an article concerning Kostelanetz’s new show (sponsored by Chesterfield
cigarettes), the conductor’s intent was described as follows:
The time is ripe for mass consumption of the Classics – not just frothy, light
Classics that are more or less familiar but real red meat, Brahms, Bach and others
in that category. With one important difference – that is. Andre proposes pocket
editions . . . In short, what the Reader’s Digest has done to literature, Andre proposes
to do to music . . .
The public will go for abbreviated Classics, he believes, although the originals
would leave them cold. The length of these masterworks is not in keeping with
modern life. Time limitations of radio for another thing rule them out. Then the
people would not sit through them if they were given all the time in the world.
Therefore Andre will prune his way down to melodies and delete all the preliminary
preludings, developments and repetitions. There will be no arrangements of these
works. What is heard will be as written by the composer only in capsule form.
Another part of the plan is to present more ambitious works of the [George]
Gershwin, [Ferde] Grofé type.32
This passage naturally provides damning evidence for the media’s role
in pandering to the same American ambivalence to high culture that so
deeply troubled Adorno, Greenberg, Macdonald, et al. It also provides
strong support for their belief that the “new media” considerably doubted
the American public’s capacity to sit still for – let alone actually listen to
and understand – works from the classical canon (in radio, this specifically
meant the popular or “familiar” classical canon, and entirely excluded
contemporary modernist music). Moreover, though it may actually reveal
more about radio producers and media hype, this article also seems to
31 Paul Whiteman, Records for the Millions (New York: Hermitage Press, 1948).
32 “Radio’s Pocket Edition of the Classics: In His New Show Andre Kostelanetz Proposes to Give
Them Red Meat but Without the Trimmings – Believes Time Is Ripe,” Metronome, October
1937, 31.
bolster Theodor Adorno’s claims that such populistic classical broadcasts

merely encouraged “regressive” listening habits in their radio audiences
by emphasizing simplified knowledge and “fetishized” works and com-
posers, and that they underscored the entertaining rewards of being able
to recognize isolated themes and moments familiarized by radio com-
mentators and music-appreciation quiz shows.33 While the Kostelanetz
quote obviously situates such trends directly in relation to the popular
symphonic jazz concert works of Gershwin and Grofé (Whiteman’s long-
time arranger), as I shall subsequently demonstrate, such trends also lie
at the core of how to interpret the period understandings of the image
of both Ellington the “serious” jazz composer, and the Ellington-focused
jazz-classical press/promotional juxtapositions.
The New Yorker critic, Alex Ross, writing in 2004, aptly referred to
the interwar period and midcentury as “the great American middlebrow
era, when [classical] music had a much different place in the culture
[and] . . . millions listened as Toscanini conducted the NBC Symphony
on national radio. [This was a period when] Walter Damrosch explained
the classics to schoolchildren, singing ditties to help them remember the
themes . . . [and] NBC would broadcast . . . the Boston Symphony broad-
cast followed by the Redskins game. I was unaware of a yawning gap
between the two.”34 Paired with the above discussion of classical democ-
ratization trends, this characterization of the interwar media democra-
tization of the accessible, warhorse classical repertory for the expanding
middle class resonates nicely with Macdonald’s assessments of the “scram-
blings” of the cultural brows, minus the midcentury highbrow angst about
this “homogenization” process. Speaking of the same nineteenth-century
efforts at cultural education that Lawrence Levine discussed in High-
brow/Lowbrow, Ross observes that “The rise of ‘classical music’ mirrored
the rise of the commercial middle class, which employed Beethoven as an
escalator to the social heights,” and this trend occurred in the influential
shadow of a popular highbrow stereotype of feigning an abhorence for
“virtuosity, extravagance, anything that smacked of entertainment.”35
More closely to the argument of this chapter, Ross points to the rhetoric
of brow discourse, asking his readers to “consider some of the rival names
33 See Horowitz, Understanding Toscanini, 229ff.

34 Alex Ross, “Listen to This,” The New Yorker, 16 and 23 February 2004, reprinted on The Rest Is
Noise: Books, Articles, and a Blog by the Music Critic of the New Yorker, www.therestisnoise
.com/2004/05/more to come 6.html (accessed 23 March 2016).
35 Ibid.
48 john howland
in circulation: ‘art’ music, ‘serious’ music, ‘great’ music, ‘good’ music.”

He contends that while
the music can be great and serious . . . greatness and seriousness are not its defining
characteristics. It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane . . . Yet some discerning souls
believe that the music should be marketed as a luxury good, one that supplants an
inferior popular product. They say, in effect, “The music you love is trash. Listen
instead to our great, arty music.” They gesture toward the heavens, but they speak
the language of high-end real estate.36
Ross’s views here ideally represent a modern, inclusive, musically plu-

ralistic perspective – and the colorful, quintessentially American hype –
around midcentury cultural hierarchy. That said, while he still holds to
a firm distinction between art and entertainment, he recognizes that art
can be entertaining, and that entertainment can be artful. Nonetheless,
despite his late-blooming personal appreciation of the potential artful-
ness of popular culture and music (this is part of the framing of his
article’s story), he admits his outlook has been informed by his parents’
midcentury generation. As such, Ross still argues for a place of special
recognition for classical music as an important benchmark of musical
art: “Some jazz aficionados also call their art ‘America’s classical music,’
and I propose a trade: they can have ‘classical,’ I’ll take ‘the music.’”37 In
this turn, Ross cedes the tired, middlebrow aura of midcentury employ-
ments of the word “classical” but argues for a continued recognition of the
long-standing hierarchical status of “highbrow” concert music. Lastly, in
an essay passage that discusses (in a modern, positive light) the “hybrid”
brow-bridging concert works of George Gershwin, Morton Gould, and
Leonard Bernstein, Ross notably initially points to the “symphonic jazz”
of Ellington’s 1943 premiere of Black, Brown and Beige at Carnegie Hall,
and Ross rightly links such trends to popular film depictions and period
class-hierarchy wars in entertainment. His example of the latter is appro-
priately the Ellington orchestra’s jazz-versus-classical “Ebony Rhapsody”
production number performance in “a silly 1934 movie entitled Murder
at the Vanities,” which as Ross aptly notes “sum[s] up the genre wars of
the era.” (I will return to this film later.)
There is of course a long history of jazz-related cultural uplift discourse
that has sought to promote Ellington’s increasingly elevated status as a
Composer (with a capital “C”). The interwar creation of the public image
36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., emphasis added.

of Ellington the composer is a multifaceted construction that had several

contributory streams, each of which allows for a different appreciation.
Beyond the straight-ahead path of merely taking the “composer” attri-
bution as an earned characterization – symbolizing cultural and racial
uplift, as well as recognition of artistry and skill from esteemed pub-
lic figures – as I argue here, midcentury middlebrow rhetoric was a not
insignificant part of the creation of Ellington’s public image, as particu-
larly seen in his promotional framing. Moreover, it should be observed
that this period understanding has clearly informed Ellingtonia in jazz
historiography, as shall be discussed later.
Reflections on Early Ellingtonia
By the late 1920s, various white critical voices increasingly disparaged

Whitemanesque symphonic jazz in the wake of newly emergent jazz crit-
icism ideals that sought to culturally elevate the blues, African American
performance aesthetics, and the music of Harlem entertainment. One key
concept behind this new criticism lay in the idea of “jazz composition,”
a practice that was held to be distinct from both jazz arrangement and
the compositional practices of Whitemanesque symphonic jazz concert
works. In fact, the latter practice was now deemed to be entirely outside
“authentic” jazz. This new conception of “jazz composition” arose in the
late 1920s and 1930s music criticism and journalism that sought to rede-
fine “authentic” jazz – and Duke Ellington’s music, in specific – as “art,”
or at the very least as musically sophisticated and/or artful. This critical
elevation of the style and performance aesthetics of black jazz (whether
actually improvised or pre-composed) took place against the backdrop
of a critical confrontation with the symphonic-style, arranged “jazz” of
Whitemanesque entertainment. The earliest expression of this trend can be
found in the essay “Jazz Contra Whiteman” by the American critic Roger
Pryor Dodge. Though this captious article was written in 1925, it was not
published until 1929 in the British journal Dancing Times, by which time
it was presented with the less confrontational title of “Negro Jazz.”38
Dodge was a severe critic of Whiteman and his peers. He argued that
the word “jazz” was being used “too loosely and too indiscriminately,”
38 Roger Pryor Dodge, “Negro Jazz,” in Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance: Roger Pryor Dodge, Collected
Writings, 1929–1964, ed. Pryor Dodge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 38. The 1925
origins of this essay are outlined by Dodge’s son, Pryor Dodge, on p.ix of the Preface.
50 john howland
it “seems to cover both true jazz and popular music in general. It

covers Paul Whiteman, George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin, none of
whom . . . belong[] to the ranks of jazz at all.”39 The symphonic jazz and
Tin Pan Alley composers, arrangers, and bandleaders who were routinely
celebrated by mid-1920s popular music critics like Gilbert Seldes and
Henry Osgood were viewed by Dodge as “exponents of frivolous art.”
Dodge further claimed that “if there is anything bogus about [contempo-
rary] jazz it is certain to be found in their type of jazz.”40 His central goal
in this article was to demonstrate the era’s cultural “confusion between
true jazz and its bastard children of polite orchestras.” Dodge contrasts
the music of these Whiteman-style, “polite” dance orchestras – ensembles
that purportedly sought to “make a lady out of jazz” – with the “virile
[and] non-emasculated jazz” of black entertainers, including the blues
singers Bessie and Clara Smith, and influential jazz instrumentalists such
as James P. Johnson and Louis Armstrong. For Dodge, the concept of “real
jazz” was indelibly tied to early 1920s, jazz- and blues-based race records.
Racial “authenticity” and black performance traditions were therefore
positioned as the central tools for Dodge’s derision of Whiteman. He
contended, for example, that
the point at which pseudo-jazz stops and jazz begins is largely a matter of degree only.
The Negro bands often take music foreign to their own culture and base their jazz
on the very popular songs or classics which form the foundation of . . . Whiteman
[-style] performances . . . But [this] is very different from the civilized and elegant
versions of the symphonic jazz band. For the Negro has taken the least possible
contribution from the notes of the melody. He distorts it beyond recognition,
makes of it an entirely new synthesis and his product is a composition – whereas that
of the symphonic band is no more than a clever arrangement.41
While this quotation underscores Dodge’s criticism of Whitemanesque

dance band arranging, it also highlights his central desire to elevate black
musical aesthetics and improvisation to the venerated cultural status that
was typically accorded to “composition” (as opposed to the purportedly
more lowly, commercial entertainment practices of dance band “arrange-
ment”).
By the late 1920s, Dodge’s views were paralleled by several prominent
critical voices that similarly sought to praise the unique music of the Cot-
ton Club-era Ellington orchestra. The most important of these figures was
39 Ibid., 3. 40 Ibid., 6. 41 Ibid., 4, emphasis added.

R. D. Darrell, a white critic who wrote for a variety of small, classically

oriented music magazines in the late 1920s and 1930s. In his reviews of the
Ellington orchestra, Darrell consistently sought to portray the bandleader
as a “serious” composer. This objective was accomplished through Dar-
rell’s appropriation of the “serious” music rhetoric typically applied in the
classical recording reviews of the magazines he wrote for. In his essays on
Ellington, Darrell focused almost exclusively on praising the bandleader’s
achievements in “jazz composition,” a subject that he tied to the Ellington
ensemble’s distinctive orchestral textures and relatively complex arrange-
ments. To Darrell, these elements suggested a new, jazz-based tonal palette
which complemented the complexity and rich diversity of classical orches-
tration. In a July 1928 review, for example, Darrell became the first critic
to comment on Ellington’s “symphonic ingenuity.”42 His assessments of
Ellington’s achievements were largely built upon comparisons to the ide-
ology, repertoire and canonic figures of classical music. In January 1931,
for instance, he characterized Mood Indigo as “a poignantly restrained and
nostalgic piece with glorious melodic endowment and scoring that even
Ravel and Strawinski might envy.” Darrell even fancifully claimed that the
scoring of this work “actually recalls those hushed muted trumpets of the
beginning of the second part of the Rite of Spring.” Likewise, he further
suggested that “Rimsky-Korsakov would rub his ears on hearing some of
the tone colors” of Ellington’s “Jungle Nights in Harlem.”43
In Darrell’s 1932 article entitled “Black Beauty” (an essay that Ellington
scholars have repeatedly characterized as “the first major critical state-
ment on Duke Ellington’s music”44 ), Ellington’s name was provocatively
placed in the heady highbrow company of Stravinsky, Bruckner, Mahler,
Delius, Debussy, Sibelius and Elgar, among others.45 In this essay, Darrell
sought to create a classically based appreciation for Ellington’s “orchestral
technique.” This goal was approached, however, through a binary critical
opposition that he had constructed between Ellingtonian “jazz composi-
tion” and Whiteman-style symphonic jazz concert works. Darrell argues
that
The larger works of Gershwin, the experiments of Copland and other “serious”
composers are [compositional] attempts with new symphonic forms stemming
42 R. D. Darrell, Phonograph Monthly, July 1928; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 35.

43 R. D. Darrell, Phonograph Monthly (January 1931); reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 38–9.
44 Tucker, Reader, 57.
45 R. D. Darrell, “Black Beauty,” disques (June 1932), 152–61; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 57–65.
52 john howland
from jazz, but not of it. Not forgetting a few virtuoso or improvisatory solos (by
[novelty pianist] Zez Confrey, [jazz musicians Joe] Venuti and [Eddie] Lang, Jimmy
[James P.] Johnson, or others), one can say truthfully that a purely instrumental
school of jazz has never grown beyond the embryonic stage.46
Darrell claimed that Ellington had singularly “emancipated American

popular music” from its subservience to the banalities of Tin Pan Alley
popular song. While in the above quotation he recognized the artfulness
of various composed and improvised instrumental jazz solos (where he
included the novelty pianist Zez Confrey among his so-called “jazz” vir-
tuosos), he nevertheless suggested that the most artistic achievements of
contemporary jazz were located in orchestral jazz composition. From this
classically biased perspective, he sought to evaluate Ellington’s recordings
solely in terms of their “balance and unity between content and form,
written notes and sounded performance.”47 Darrell praised Ellington for
his ability to weld together jazz “composition, orchestration, and perfor-
mance into one inseparable whole.” In terms of evaluating his approach
to form, however, Darrell went only so far as to suggest that Ellington’s
“finest tunes” were “rhapsodic” in nature and as “natural . . . as those of
Mozart and Schubert.”
The middlebrow jazz/classical comparative framework of Darrell’s
reviews is important because this critical approach was quickly reflected
in a variety of texts on Ellington from the early to mid-1930s. Ameri-
can contributors to this literature included Darrell, Roger Pryor Dodge
(especially his 1934 essay “Harpsichords and Jazz Trumpets”) and Warren
Scholl (who in 1934 claimed that “as jazz king, [Ellington] has superseded
Paul Whiteman”), among others.48 Yet some of the most influential texts
of this trend were by European critics, a fact that was not lost on Euro-
deferential American jazz critics and the music’s proponents. (Beyond the
fact that many Americans in this era understood high culture to be largely
Euro-centric and defined by European art history, the opinions of promi-
nent European critics, artists, and tastemakers held an outsize importance
in interwar popular culture arts discourse, particularly in light of a long-
held American cultural inferiority complex in relation to the dominant
46 Ibid., 60. 47 Ibid., 61.

48 Roger Pryor Dodge, “Harpsichords and Jazz Trumpets,” Hound and Horn (July–September,
1934), 602–6; reprinted in full in Dodge, Hot Jazz, 12–26, and in part in Tucker, Reader,
105–10. Warren W. Scholl, “Duke Ellington – A Unique Personality,” Music Lovers’ Guide 2
(February 1934): 169–70, 176; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 102–5.
cultures of Europe.) One of the more influential texts of this latter Euro-
pean jazz-criticism camp is found in the Ellington-related musings of a
1934 book entitled Music Ho!, by the Englishman Constant Lambert.49
Lambert’s Music Ho! played a major role in the journalistic reception
of Ellington as a “serious” jazz composer in the 1930s and 1940s. This
influence was exerted in part because Lambert was a noted European
composer, critic, and ballet conductor, and he therefore represented a
voice of cultural authority to the American popular music press. Lambert’s
musings on Ellington were regularly cited in American journalism on the
bandleader and his orchestra throughout the mid- to late 1930s. In the
key extended passage of this book’s discussion of Ellington, Lambert states
that
Ellington . . . is a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction. His works –
apart from a few minor details – are not left to the caprice or ear of . . . [his]
instrumentalists; they are scored and written out . . . [T]he first American records
of his music may [thus] be taken definitively, like a full score, and are the only jazz
records worth studying for their form as well as their texture . . .
The real interest of Ellington’s records lies not so much in their colour, brilliant
though it may be, as in the amazingly skilful proportions in which the colour is used.
I do not only mean skilful as compared with other jazz composers, but as compared
with so-called highbrow composers. I know of nothing in Ravel so dexterous in
treatment as the varied solos in the middle of the ebullient Hot and Bothered and
nothing in Stravinsky more dynamic than the final section [of this recording] . . .
Ellington’s best works are written in what may be called ten-inch record form,
and he is perhaps the only composer to raise this insignificant disc to the dignity of a
definite genre . . . [B]eyond its limits [though,] he is inclined to fumble. The double-
sided ten-inch Creole Rhapsody is an exception, but the twelve-inch expansion of
the same piece is nothing more than a potpourri without any of the nervous
tension of the original version . . . He is definitely a petit-maı̂tre, but that, after all,
is considerably more than many people thought either jazz or the coloured race
would ever produce. He has crystallized the popular music of our time and set
up a standard by which we may judge not only other jazz composers but also
those highbrow composers, whether American or European, who indulge in what
is roughly known as “symphonic jazz.”50
This often-cited text reflects a number of tropes that are central to the clas-
sically biased Ellington literature discussed above. These themes include
49 Constant Lambert, Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline (originally 1934; republished
London: Penguin Books, 1948). This passage forms the centerpiece of Tucker’s excerpt from
the book in Tucker, Reader, 110–11.
50 Lambert, Music Ho!, 155–7.
54 john howland
the then-provocative statement that Ellington was “a real composer” and

“the first jazz composer.” To support this thesis, Lambert claims – without
providing any evidence – that Ellington’s works are “written out” (obvi-
ously this was true, but there were quite a number of contradictory period
critical statements that claim Ellington did not write out music for his
band). This bias toward the artistic authority of notation in turn allowed
Lambert to argue that Ellington’s records “may [thus] be taken defini-
tively, like a full [classical] score,” and that they were “worth studying
[both] for their form” and their “combination of themes.” (He thus takes
a rather progressive stance by regarding the recording itself as the definitive
medium of the “work,” whether or not the “composition” exists in fully
notated detail.) Lambert pigeonholed Ellington as a master of “ten-inch
record form,” and he claimed that the composer/bandleader was “inclined
to fumble” beyond the limits of this medium (again, this was stated with-
out any proof of his evaluative criteria). Like the rest of this body of
criticism, Lambert couched his discussion of Ellington’s artistic merits in
elaborate comparisons to the works of various classical composers he held
in high esteem (including Grieg, Delius, Ravel, Stravinsky, Hindemith,
Johann Strauss, and others). However, while the term “symphonic jazz”
is mentioned in this excerpt, the precise relationship that Lambert sought
to establish between Ellington and this idiom is lost without referring to
the larger context of this quotation in Music Ho!
Like R. D. Darrell, Lambert distinguished between “composed” jazz
and “symphonic jazz.” However, Lambert idiosyncratically reserved “sym-
phonic jazz” as a term that specifically referred to the jazz-derived compo-
sitions of a select group of “highbrow” composers (Darius Milhaud, Kurt
Weill, Copland, etc.). Despite this biased reading, the contemporary jour-
nalistic appropriations of Lambert’s musings on Ellington consistently
presented a selective and skewed reading of Lambert’s original intent. His
cultural view of the relationships between symphonic jazz, Ellington and
“jazz composition” are more directly evident in this lesser-known passage
from Music Ho!:
The development of jazz is now clearly in the hands of the sophisticated [highbrow]
composer. The negro composer [Ellington] was able to give new life to his music
by moving . . . [toward] the harmonies . . . of Delius, but he cannot execute a similar
move today for the simple reason that the post-impressionist experiments, the
austerities and asperities of Stravinsky and Bartók, are hardly of the type that lend
themselves to [Ellington’s] sentimental exploitation. The scoring and execution of
jazz reach a far higher level than any previous form of dance music, and in Duke
Ellington’s compositions jazz has produced the most distinguished popular music
since Johann Strauss; but having caught up with the highbrow composer in so
many ways the jazz composer [Ellington] is now stagnating, bound to a circle of
rhythmic and harmonic devices and neglecting the possibilities of form. It is now for
the highbrow composer to take the next step.51
The overlooked subtitle of Lambert’s book is “A Study of Music in Decline,”

and this condescending highbrow attitude toward the rising cultural influ-
ence of popular music reflects Lambert’s view of Ellington as a “light” com-
poser for the masses. For Lambert, this artful popular music occupied the
same cultural territory as democratic, middlebrow concert works (though
the fully formed critical idea of “middlebrowism” is slightly anachronis-
tic at this date). In terms of the Whitemanesque symphonic jazz idiom,
Lambert suggested that American attempts at the “synthesis of jazz” in
concert works were too often manifest in a manner in which “Euro-
pean sophistication [had] been imposed over coloured [racially evoca-
tive musical] crudity.” He contended that this was “what happened in
that singularly inept albeit popular piece, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.”
On this, Lambert claimed that in “trying to write a Lisztian concerto
in jazz style,” Gershwin had “used only the non-barbaric elements in
dance music, the result being neither good jazz nor good Liszt.”52 In
addition, he argued that the “jazz” of most Whiteman-style works was
“either too Hollywood or too Harlem” (the latter being Lambert’s so-
called “coloured crudity”), and these works “rarely suggest[ed] the dusty
panorama of American life which [gave] such strength to even second-rate
films.”53
The idea of Ellington’s mastery of “ten-inch record form” first emerged
in Lambert’s journalism of the early 1930s and was based solely on the
Ellington orchestra’s Cotton Club-era, “jungle”-style recordings. In 1931,
a year before the commercial release of Ellington’s Creole Rhapsody, Lam-
bert praised the Harlem bandleader for the fact that all of his composi-
tions/recordings “only occupy one side of a 10 in[ch] record.” Lambert
suggested that these recordings were “all the better for this limitation.
A jazz record should be as terse as possible, and it would be a pity if
Ellington started to produce rambling, pseudo-highbrow fantasies such as
Gershwin’s more ambitious essays. The two best Ellington records . . . are
Hot and Bothered . . . and Mood Indigo . . . and neither of them attempts
51 Ibid., 161–2, emphasis added. 52 Ibid., 162, emphasis added. 53 Ibid., 164.
56 john howland
any change of mood.”54 Once again, Ellington’s “authentic,” ten-inch

record compositions were pointedly placed in critical juxtaposition against
the “false” jazz and “pseudo-highbrow fantasies” of middlebrow White-
manesque concert works.
Music Ho! was published shortly after the Ellington orchestra had com-
pleted a highly successful European tour. This tour encouraged significant
American press coverage of the European musical community’s recep-
tion of Ellington, his music, and his orchestra. The subsequent secondary
and biographical Ellington literature that has examined this reception has
routinely pointed to this ballyhooed tour as a major turning point in the
public’s reception of Ellington – and in his own view of himself – as a
“serious composer.” This thesis has been based on the fact that on this
tour Ellington was presented for the first time as a concert artist, and that
European music critics had routinely discussed Ellington’s music through
the cultural rhetoric of “serious” concert music (as opposed to treating it as
“frivolous” dance band entertainment). Moreover, many European critics
had encouraged Ellington to perform only his “pure” “orchestral” music
(items like Creole Rhapsody), rather than his commercial song hits.55 Lam-
bert was one of these critics (writing for the London Referee at the time),
and the opinions of his subsequent book were presaged in his criticism of
this period.
In addition to the 1933 European tour and the influence of Music Ho!,
there is a third key event that was perpetually mentioned in the classically
biased, Ellington music journalism of the early 1930s. This occurrence was
a November 1932 performance/demonstration lecture that Ellington and
his orchestra participated in at New York University. This event was orga-
nized by the noted composer (and NYU Music Department chairman)
Percy Grainger, and included such distinguished guests as the conductors
Leopold Stokowski and Basil Cameron (of the Seattle Symphony), and the
composer Wallingford Riegger. Ellington’s NYU appearance resulted in a
number of widely reported remarks by Grainger that compared Ellington’s
compositions with the orchestral genius of Delius and the melodic inven-
tiveness of Bach. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, American popu-
lar music journalism on Ellington regularly referred to these events (and
others like them) as a means to distinguish Ellington’s accomplishments
54 Constant Lambert, “Gramophone Notes,” New Statesman and Nation (1 August 1931), 150.
Quoted in Hasse, Beyond, 154.
55 For a good overview of this tour, see Hasse, Beyond, 169–75.
from the “frivolous” activities of his peers in contemporary jazz and dance
orchestras.
“Tips on Exploitation”: The Role of Ellington’s

Publicity Machine
The reader might wonder how the opinions of these relatively obscure
critics from various niche magazines (critics such as Darrell and Scholl),
or how an equally obscure British composer and critic such as Lam-
bert (obscure, that is, to the American public), could have received so
much attention in American popular music journalism. One answer can
be found in Ellington’s public relations machine. From 1926 to 1938,
Ellington’s career was intimately guided by Irving Mills, a man who was
reputed to be one of the shrewdest managers in the entertainment indus-
try of that era. In 1938, Ellington and Mills had a major falling out, after
which Ellington joined the talent stable of the famous publicity agency of
William Morris. It is likely that this choice in management was influenced
by Ellington’s long-time publicist with Mills Artists (the publicity wing of
Irving Mills’s outfit), Ned Williams, who had left that organization some
time before Ellington to join William Morris.56 Because of the relative
continuity of Williams’s presence in guiding Ellington publicity from the
late 1920s through the 1940s, there is a great similarity in the promotional
themes that were central to the management of Ellington at each of these
agencies. Nevertheless, it was Mills’s long-standing promotion of Elling-
ton as a “serious” composer that had contributed to the public persona
of this composer/bandleader. This dignified persona was ultimately able
to transcend the initial race-bound, “jungle music” themes that defined
Ellington’s Cotton Club-era career (themes that were also tied to Mills-era
publicity). Mills was thus a major force in shaping the coverage of the 1933
European tour, and he likely helped stage such classical-themed events as
the 1932 NYU lecture.
The legacy of Mills’s public relations agenda for Ellington can be sensed
in an extant William Morris Agency “Manual for Advertising” that was
prepared for the Ellington orchestra in 1938. This document was presum-
ably developed under the guidance of Ned Williams. The folio describes
itself as a “manual of publicity stories, tips on exploitation and advertising
suggestions . . . prepared to assist the managers of theatres and ballrooms
56 Ibid., 194 and 220.

58 john howland
to more intelligently sell this attraction [Ellington].”57 Publicity’s role in

this era’s classically biased journalism on Ellington can be seen in the fact
that even in 1938, Grainger’s Ellington/Delius comments are mentioned
in no fewer than eight articles and clippings in this nine-page press packet
(six years after the band’s NYU appearance). In its advice on “Exploita-
tion,” the Morris Agency provides the following introduction to the artist
for his potential promoters:
Ellington’s genius as a composer, arranger and musician has won him the respect and
admiration of such authorities as Percy Grainger, head of the department of music
at the New York University; Basil Cameron, conductor of the Seattle Symphony
Orchestra; Leopold Stokowski, famed conductor of the celebrated Philadelphia
orchestra; Paul Whiteman, whose name is synonymous with jazz; and many others.
Sell Ellington as a great artist, a musical genius whose unique style and individual
theories of harmony have created a new music . . . He has been accepted seriously by
many of the greatest minds in the world of music, who have regarded it a privilege
to study his art and to discuss his theories with him.58
A related passage of ready-made press copy notes that “Grainger compares

Ellington’s jazz compositions, from a melodic standpoint, with those of
Delius and Bach.”59 Another article suggests that promoters organize
similar “music classes” by asking local music teachers “to play Ellington
records for their classes and to discuss and analyze them thoroughly,
particularly from the standpoint of Grainger’s opinions . . . If some minor
controversy arises on the subject, so much the better from getting space in
the news columns of your daily newspapers.”60 Like the Manual’s recycling
of the NYU event, R. D. Darrell’s “Black Beauty” essay is quoted twice as
a means to emphasize the idea that “in the exploitation of the new tonal
coloring, Ellington has proceeded further than any composer – popular
or serious – of today.”61 This press packet additionally provides an excerpt
from a 1933 Lambert review in which this critic foreshadowed many of
the Ellington themes that were to become central to Music Ho!: “Duke
Ellington is a real composer, the first jazz composer of note and the
first Negro composer of note . . . Ellington is no mere band leader and
arranger . . . but a composer of uncommon merit [and] probably the first
composer of real character to come out of America.”62
57 The William Morris Agency’s Manual for Advertising, c. 1938, for Duke Ellington and His
Orchestra, from the first page entitled “Advertising Manual.” Assembled on loose pages
without numbers. From the Duke Ellington Collection.
58 Ibid., from a page entitled “Exploitation.” 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., “Ellington’s Music and Mickey Mouse Only Original Art,” from a page entitled “Press
Stories.”
Beyond their recycling of this Mills-era middlebrow promotional mate-

rial, the Morris Agency were strongly committed to expanding upon the
public image of Ellington as a “serious” jazz composer. In the late 1930s
and 1940s, some of these Mills-era materials were simply used as lead-ins
for new commentary, as in the following press copy that appears after a
passage on the Grainger event:
Other indications of the growing artistic appreciation of Ellington in the United

States are contained in the fact that the annual award of the New York Schools of
Music to an American composer was voted to Duke Ellington in 1932 for his Creole
Rhapsody, and, more recently, Paul Whiteman’s inclusion of Ellington’s Mood Indigo
in his program with the New York Philharmonic Symphony.
So, while English newspapers all assign their first-string [classical] music critics
to Duke Ellington openings, he remains within the province of dramatic, motion
picture and radio editors in the United States. But in one year . . . it may be common
practice to employ the New Yorker’s recent ranking of “Gershwin, Ellington and
Grofé,” when writing of contemporary American composers.63
A related passage of copy, which is revealingly titled “Ellington’s Ability as

Composer Given Serious Approval,” provides another spin on the themes
of this previous quotation:
The jazz blues era and the hey-day of the popular orchestra as we hear it on the
stage, over the radio, and in hotels, ballrooms and night clubs, have produced
few musicians whose accomplishments as composers and conductors have received
serious critical approbation. The men who have achieved something more than
popular and evanescent acclaim can still be numbered on the strings of one violin –
George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, Ferde Grofé and Duke Ellington. The last name
is indeed a unique figure in American music.64
As these excerpts suggest, the Morris manual provides very selective read-
ings of the critical materials it appropriates, and its spin on “Ellington,
the serious composer” distinctly places him within the nexus of White-
manesque symphonic jazz. In the first quotation, this perspective is evi-
denced in the promotional citations of both the New Yorker comment
and the 1932 New York Schools. In this press packet, many passages read
as a potpourri of Whitemanesque and Darrell/Lambert/Grainger themes.
A good example of this type of Whiteman/classical thematic merging
can seen in a passage which claims that “critics have said that Ellington
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid., “Ellington’s Ability as Composer Given Serious Approval,” from a page entitled “Press
Stories.”
60 john howland
has mastered the small form as thoroughly as Gershwin, that he has

found the happy identity between material and medium which character-
ized Delius and Debussy . . . and that his finest tunes spring into being as
simply and naturally as those of Mozart and Schubert.”65 The Ellington
scrapbooks at the Smithsonian make clear that this middlebrow, White-
man-colored reading of “Ellington, the composer” dominated much of
the press coverage on the orchestra’s national tours of the 1930s. This was
especially the case outside of major urban centers, in smaller cities and
towns whose local journalistic coverage displays a greater reliance on this
type of pre-prepared, promotional material. This demographic disparity
between original, semi-original and agency-prepared journalism is also
likely applicable to Mills-era Ellington press coverage, a body of literature
that also reflects these promotional themes. The Morris Agency materials
also reveal a new promotional topic that emerges in late 1930s Ellington-
related journalism: the theme of Ellington’s “symphonic” compositional
aspirations. In the 1938 Manual, this subject can be seen in such press
copy as the following excerpt:
While Ellington is believed by critics to have mastered the small forms as completely
as Gershwin, the possibility of still greater success in the formal field still lies before
him. His one attempt at a larger form, the two-part Creole Rhapsody, has attracted
much critical attention.
At present, Ellington is engaged in the composition of a five-part symphony in
which he intends to interpret the successive stages of fortune and misfortune of his
race – [this symphony begins with] a prelude given over to prehistoric speculation,
then an African movement of jungle rhythms, frankly pagan, then a slave-ship
interlude, followed by a Southern suite, a blending of all of these in a movement
expressive of Harlem today, and a final rhapsody of the colored race.
Thus, Ellington’s audiences at the will include not
only those attracted by an exceptional and nationally famous orchestra, but serious
students of music who will pay tribute to the artistry of an internationally famous
composer.66
In light of Gershwin’s recent death (1937), it is intriguing to observe that

this copy suggests that Ellington was following a Gershwin-like develop-
mental progression based on his mastery of ever-larger and ever-more
complex musical forms – from song, to extended jazz composition, and,
lastly, to his plans for a “serious” concert work (the projected “Negro
symphony”). Ellington’s capacity for this middlebrow heroic trajectory of
artistic growth is meant to be evidenced through this article’s references
65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., from a page entitled “Press Stories.”

to his previous “critical attention” and his “international fame as a com-

poser.” Contemporaneous with the circulation of this press packet are
several 1938 interviews that conveniently mentioned Ellington’s work on
an opera and/or a symphony. These pronouncements document the long
gestational period that led to the composition of Ellington’s 1943 Black,
Brown and Beige,67 but also the Ellingtonia-focused “jazz classics” albums
of the same decade.
“The Real Jazz”?: The Critical Creation of a “Serious”

Jazz Composer
As demonstrated, the campaign to promote a culturally elevated image

of Ellington as a “serious” jazz composer was developed in near tandem
with the rise of the classically biased criticism of Dodge, Lambert, Darrell,
et al. In most cases, the central themes of this latter circle developed
independently of Mills’s publicity machine, although excerpts from this
criticism were quickly put to work in the press materials of the Mills
Artists agency. While there must have been some professional advantage
to promoting Ellington in these glorified, middlebrow terms, it remains
unclear what proportion of this promotional rhetoric was instigated by
Ellington’s publicists, on the one hand, and how much can be ascribed to
Ellington himself, on the other. Obviously, there can be major differences
between an artist’s publicity and the views he himself holds. However,
Ellington – the self-described “Aristocrat of Jazz” and “Duke of Hot” –
cultivated this sort of refined cultural image well before he met Irving
Mills, and long after that association had ended.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the interviews and the essays that
appeared under Ellington’s name68 strongly suggested that he had long
aspired to compose concert-style works. Prior to the symphonic scale of
67 Florence Zunser, “‘Opera Must Die,’ Says Galli-Gurci! Long Live the Blues!,” New York Evening
Graphic Magazine, 27 December 1930; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 44–5. Duke Ellington, “The
Duke Steps Out,” Rhythm (March 1931): 20–2; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 46–50. Wilder
Hobson, “Introducing Duke Ellington,” Fortune (August 1933): 47–8, 90, 94, 95; reprinted in
Tucker, Reader, 95–6. Jess Krueger, “Duke Ellington Plans Symphony: Orchestra Director
Humming Parts of Composition,” American (Chicago), 2 January 1935 (from the Ellington
Scrapbooks of the Duke Ellington Collection). Carl Cons, “A Black Genius in a White Man’s
World,” Down Beat (July 1936): 6.
68 For a sampling of Ellington’s essays from this period, see Tucker, Reader. While I assume these
texts were authored by Ellington, the William Morris Manual raises the valid question of
whether there may have been some additional editorial help in shaping these statements.
62 john howland
Black, Brown and Beige and his Carnegie Hall appearances in the 1940s, this
goal had been progressively realized through such early extended works as
Ellington’s Rhapsody Jr. (1926), Creole Rhapsody (1932; in two versions),
Reminiscing in Tempo (1935), his score to the film short Symphony in
Black (Paramount, 1935), Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (1937), and
several 1930s “Modern American Music” score commissions for the pub-
lisher Robbins Music and bandleader Paul Whiteman.69 Contrary to the
typical Whiteman/Ellington aesthetic opposition that was central to the
critical arguments of Lambert, Darrell, Dodge, et al., both Ellington and
his publicists regularly situated his compositional aspirations within the
cultural sphere of Whitemanesque (or Gershwinesque) symphonic jazz.
The extensive pre-1940 cultivation of Ellington’s image as a symphonic
jazz-style composer/bandleader can be seen, for example, in the orches-
tra’s performance of Gershwin’s American in Paris score as a ballet in
Ziegfeld’s 1928 musical, Show Girl, in his acting roles as a “serious” jazz
composer for the film shorts Black and Tan (RKO, 1929) and Symphony
in Black (Paramount, 1935), and in his band’s cameo role in the “Rape
of a Rhapsody” sequence in the film Murder at the Vanities (Paramount,
1934). As noted, the latter was a jazzed classics number which parodied
Franz Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. Alex Ross aptly captures the
irreverent artful entertainment of the latter production number:
It is set behind the scenes of a Ziegfeld-style variety show, one of whose numbers
features a performer, dressed vaguely as Franz Liszt, who plays the Second Hungar-
ian Rhapsody. Duke Ellington and his band keep popping up behind the scenes,
throwing in insolent riffs. Eventually, they drive away the effete classical musicians
and play a takeoff called “Ebony Rhapsody”: “It’s got those licks, it’s got those tricks
/ That Mr. Liszt would never recognize.” Liszt comes back with a submachine gun
and mows down the band. The metaphor wasn’t so far off the mark . . .
The contempt flowed both ways. The culture of jazz, at least in its white precincts,
was much affected by that inverse snobbery which endlessly congratulates itself on
escaping the élite. (The singer in “Murder at the Vanities” brags of finding a rhythm
that Liszt, of all people, could never comprehend: what a snob.) Classical music
became a foil against which popular musicians could assert their earthy cool.70
Here again we find the issue of two-way aura transference in a high–low

entertainment juxtaposition (i.e., in the manner described earlier with
regard to the 1930s gold-digger film musical narrative clichés). This is
69 This score series is discussed at length in Howland, Between the Muses and Uptown.
70 Ross, “Listen to This.”
also another prime example for Macdonald’s fear of homogenized cul-

tural scramblings. While Ross does not comment on the elevation aura
that Ellington gained in this presentation, he is quite right in his charac-
terization of this number as a sustained juxtaposition that does not truly
“homogenize” these cultural scramblings – Ellington retains his “earthy
cool,” Liszt remains an elevated European classical composer despite his
American entertainment comeuppance, and Ellington has yet another
media moment where he is depicted as being on equal cultural footing
with a classical icon, while at the same time his quintessential jazz hipness
sophistication is seen to transcend such playful Hollywood nonsense and
class hierarchy stodginess.
In all of these Ellingtonian symphonic jazz-based activities of the 1930s,
it is hard to separate the bandleader himself from the image being pro-
moted by his publicity machine and the media events that were instigated
by his manager. These blurred boundaries between publicity, manager,
and client are even apparent in the origins of Ellington’s earliest concert-
style works. According to Ellington’s son, Mercer, for instance:
Irving [Mills] understood the importance of adding prestige to the [Ellington]

product, almost, I would say, of packaging it. So did Ellington. When Irving came
to him in his managerial capacity in Chicago . . . [in 1931] and told [Ellington] he
wanted him to write a “rhapsody” for performance [the] next day, [Ellington] sat
up all night writing Creole Rhapsody. This was recorded by “The Jungle Band” for
Brunswick [the first recording] and by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra for Victor
[the second version]. What made it particularly significant at that time was that
it occupied both sides of a ten-inch 78 rpm record on the former label and both
sides of a twelve-inch record on the latter. Apart from Paul Whiteman’s, few bands
had had this privilege, so for a black band it was a major step forward and the first
example of Pop’s ability in “extended” composition.71
In Mercer Ellington’s account of this landmark event in Ellingtonian

“extended” jazz composition, the motivating factor behind the composi-
tion of Creole Rhapsody was Irving Mills’s managerial scheme to broaden
the social spectrum of Ellington’s audiences by directly encroaching on
Whiteman’s signature cultural territory. In the passage following this quo-
tation, Mercer implies that Mills built Ellington’s career through a series of
ever-widening and ever-rising steps into new cultural arenas and perfor-
mance contexts. This progressive career trajectory is traced from Elling-
ton’s origins at the lowly Kentucky Club, to his prestigious tenure at the
71 Mercer Ellington with Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington In Person (New York: Da Capo, 1979), 34.
64 john howland
Cotton Club, to his headlining of first-class vaudeville stage shows, to

backing the French singer Maurice Chevalier, to his orchestra’s appear-
ance in a Ziegfeld show, to their achievement of national fame through
live radio broadcasts, to Hollywood films, and to the concert stages of
Europe. This latter accomplishment is said to be the catalyst that allowed
the Ellington orchestra to perform at prestigious concert halls through-
out the U.S. The promotion of Ellington’s image as a combination of bon
vivant maestro and “serious” composer in the manner of Whiteman and
Gershwin, respectively (albeit a black conductor/composer in Ellington’s
case), was the means by which Mills moved Ellington’s career up this
complicated ladder of symbolic cultural and racial achievements.
What did Ellington think of all of this? Throughout his career, he was
known for his guarded and often evasive statements on other public fig-
ures and his own beliefs on various cultural, racial, and political issues. In
general, I believe his interwar and midcentury press-reported responses
cannot be trusted at face value as entirely accurate reflections of his opin-
ions on any given matter. In his later autobiography though, Ellington
confirmed Mills’s role in the genesis of Creole Rhapsody, a work that Elling-
ton characterized as “the seed from which all kinds of extended works and
suites later grew.”72 Like his son’s account of this event, Ellington recol-
lected that one evening Mills simply remarked that “tomorrow is a big
day . . . [w]e premiere a new long work – a rhapsody.”73 In his reflections
on this interaction, Ellington wrote that Mills “was always reaching toward
a higher plateau for our music,” and he felt that this proposed rhapsody
was merely another expression of this larger goal.74 From such modest
evidence, it seems that Ellington was largely in agreement with the gen-
eral direction of the promotional image that positioned him as Harlem’s
answer to Whiteman and Gershwin. However, this comparative associ-
ation directly contradicts the critical reception of Ellington that more
often sought to distance this composer/conductor from Whitemanesque
entertainment.
In the 1930s, Ellington’s compositional aspirations became a highly
divisive issue for two distinct critical camps. Beyond the Lam-
bert/Darrell/Dodge circle of classically biased jazz critics, there was also a
second group of music critics who sought to redefine the tradition, canon,
future – and art – of jazz specifically through improvisational achievement
and African American performance aesthetics. While jazz composition
72 Ibid., 82. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid.

was still a significant topic to this latter critical circle, it was not a priv-
ileged aesthetic criterion; rather, the formal structure of an arrangement
was primarily viewed as a vehicle for other more important elements of the
jazz tradition. The aesthetic agenda of this latter group can be seen in the
landmark jazz criticism of John Hammond and the Frenchman Hugues
Panassié. Ellington was an exalted darling, though, of each of these cir-
cles of critics. Like Lambert, in this latter circle, the praise of Ellington’s
band – in terms of composition, jazz authenticity, and improvisation –
lay particularly in Ellington’s masterpieces of “ten-inch record form.” To
appropriate the title of one of Hammond’s famous articles of the 1930s
though, for Hammond and Panassié, “The Tragedy of Duke Ellington”
was his interest in “extended” composition. This critical issue heatedly
came to the fore in 1935 with Ellington’s Reminiscing in Tempo, a compo-
sition that covered four sides of two ten-inch, 78-rpm records.75 Following
the commercial release of this recording, Hammond, Panassié, and other
like-minded critics soon claimed that Ellington had, sadly, begun to take
himself seriously as a composer in the wake of the classically biased praise
of such British composer-critics as Constant Lambert and Spike Hughes
during the band’s 1933 European tour. In his scathing review of Reminisc-
ing in Tempo (“The Tragedy of Duke Ellington”), Hammond claimed that
when Ellington was “confronted with the undiscriminating praise of crit-
ics like Constant Lambert, he felt it necessary to go out and prove he could
write really important music, far removed from the simplicity and charm
of his earlier tunes.”76 This remark blatantly ignores the fact that Lam-
bert equally discouraged Ellington from attempting to compose anything
longer than one side of a ten-inch record. Nevertheless, in such criticism,
the chief theme was that with these efforts at “extended” composition,
Ellington had regrettably moved into the problematic cultural territory of
Whitemanesque symphonic jazz and was in danger of abandoning “real
jazz.”
With the rise of the Swing era in the mid-1930s, the new concept of
“real jazz” quickly rooted itself in American popular music criticism (as
distinct from sweet jazz, novelty music, popular song, and so forth). This
project of genre clarification was largely instigated as a defense against
the musical and critical legacy of Whitemanesque symphonic jazz, which
75 See my extensive discussion of this work in Howland, Uptown.

76 John Hammond, “The Tragedy of Duke Ellington, the ‘Black Prince of Jazz,’” Down Beat
(November 1935): 1, 6. Originally published in the Brooklyn Eagle, 3 November 1935;
reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 118–20.
66 john howland
in the mid-1930s was primarily manifest in the music of contemporary

radio and theater orchestras, various film scores, the continued enter-
tainment presence of Whiteman himself, the Robbins Modern Ameri-
can Music score series, Artie Shaw’s “Symphonic Swing,” and similar
trends. While French critics such as Robert Goffin (in his Aux frontières
du jazz of 1932) and Panassié (in Le Jazz Hot of 1934) led the critical
path toward defending and culturally elevating “hot jazz,” the landmark
American text in this critical vogue was the 1939 anthology Jazzmen that
was edited by Frederick Ramsey, Jr., and Charles Edward Smith.77 The
final essay of this collection is Roger Pryor Dodge’s “Consider the Crit-
ics,” an extended – and scathing – overview of both 1920s liberal “jazz”
criticism and Whitemanesque symphonic jazz. By 1942, the concept of
“hot jazz” had been replaced by the idea of “real jazz,” as can be evidenced
in the translated title of Panassié’s 1942 book, The Real Jazz. (This book
was adapted for American publication by Charles Edward Smith.) Even
at this late date, the critical contrast between “real” jazz and symphonic
jazz remained a vital distinction, as can be seen in the fact that Panassié’s
book presents an attack on Whiteman in its very first page. Panassié ulti-
mately dismisses the 1920s Whitemanesque dance bands in the following
terms:
Certain white bands, deliberately turning their backs to the style of the colored
orchestras, offered the [white] public the kind of music most calculated to flatter
its taste, and at the same time preserving a superficial resemblance to jazz for its
“novelty” value. Instead of improvising, they used arrangements and played them
with the utmost softness. Since these arrangements were often somewhat complex,
as with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, the term “symphonic jazz” began to appear, an
expression that shows how far afield the music in question tended to go from real
jazz.78
The accusation that Ellington’s artistic ambitions were bolstered by the

highbrow-oriented praise of the British composer-critics merits consid-
eration. In his reflections on this tour, for instance, Ellington recalled
that “the esteem our music was held in was very gratifying.”79 Regardless,
77 Robert Goffin, Aux frontières du jazz (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1932); Hugues Panassié, Hot
Jazz: The Guide to Swing Music (New York: Witmark & Sons, 1936), originally Le Jazz Hot
(Paris: Éditions R. A. Corrêa, 1934); and Frederick Ramsey, Jr. and Charles Edward Smith,
eds., Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1939; reprinted New York: Limelight, 1985).
78 Hugues Panassié, The Real Jazz, trans. Anne Sorelle Williams, adapted for American
publication by Charles Edward Smith (New York: Smith & Durrell, 1942), 12, emphasis added.
79 Ellington, Mistress, 83–4.
even as early as 1930 (prior to Mills’s suggestion of a rhapsody and the

potential critical influence of Lambert, Grainger, et al.), Ellington’s com-
positional aspirations had emerged in several press interviews, and these
early ambitions were characterized by their overt Whitemanesque lean-
ings. In December 1930, for example, an interviewer claimed that Elling-
ton had “been playing . . . not only ‘jazz,’ but [an idiom] which is a totally
new type of modern music, and which he believes, is to take the place
of our present-day symphonies, concertos and opera.” The interviewer
quoted Ellington as having said both that “the future of music . . . lies in
the hands of those writers of Tin Pan Alley who see in popular songs and
melodies of today the embodiment of the voice of the people,” and that
“Beethoven, Wagner and Bach . . . have not portrayed the people who are
about us today, and the interpretation of these people is our future music.”
In response to this latter cultural problem, the interviewer claimed that
Ellington was “at work on . . . the writing, in music, of ‘The History of the
Negro,’ taking the Negro from Egypt, going with him to savage Africa,
and from there to the sorrow and slavery of Dixie, and finally ‘home to
Harlem.’”80 Mark Tucker has observed that this interview marked one
of the first documented statements of Ellington’s long-held “interest in
composing music that embodied the experience of black Americans.”81
Over the next decade, this specific work-in-progress was subsequently
described as an opera and a symphony, and it was ultimately realized
in the guise of Ellington’s 1943 “tone parallel,” Black, Brown and Beige.
While the scattered journalistic references leading up to this work provide
important information about Ellington’s aspirations as a composer, these
texts also reveal clues as to how his creative goals related to a variety of
contemporary cultural trends. In his March 1931 essay “The Duke Steps
Out,” for example, Ellington states that “what is being done by Countee
Cullen and others in [Harlem] literature is overdue in our music.” Fol-
lowing this racially provocative proclamation, Ellington echoed his 1930
interview by noting that
I am . . . now engaged on a rhapsody unhampered by any musical form in which I

intend to portray the experiences of the coloured races in the syncopated idiom.
This composition will consist of four or five movements, and I . . . hope that I
shall have achieved something really worth while in the literature of music, and
80 Florence Sunser, New York Evening Graphic, 27 December 1930; reprinted in Tucker, Reader,
44–5.
81 Ibid., 44.
68 john howland
that an authentic record of my race written by a member of it shall be placed on

record.82
Despite his prophecy that “the future of [concert] music . . . [lay] in the
hands of [the] writers of Tin Pan Alley,” this latter statement presents a
newly personal and racially defined coloring of Ellington’s intentions, and
this latter agenda more directly reflects the Harlem entertainment circle’s
concert jazz aspirations.83
By the mid-1940s, following major changes in both popular music
criticism and the landscape of jazz, Ellington became somewhat more
forthright about his opinions on the Lambert/Darrell criticism of the
previous decade. For example, in 1944, in near parallel with the afore-
mentioned Elingtonia “jazz classics” albums, he pointedly stated that:
I am not writing classical music, and the musical devices that have been handed
down by serious composers have little bearing on modern swing . . . If anyone finds
Schoenbergian “images” in Solitude, Mood Indigo or any of my other compositions,
they should charge it to subconscious activity. I did not intend them and in all
probability they do not exist anywhere but in the minds of self-important, over-
sophisticated musicologists who like to make an occasional comparison.
That I owe a debt to . . . classical composers is not to be denied but it is the
same debt that many composers, for generations, have owed to Brahms, Beethoven,
Debussy and others of their caliber. They have furnished us with wholesome musi-
cal patterns . . . and have given us a definite basis upon which to judge all music,
regardless of its origin. . . .
Comparisons, especially in the case of a “hot” composer, are dangerous . . . [T]he
professional jazz critics . . . have put me on the witness stand in the case of Bach,
Ravel, Stravinsky, Sibelius, and quite a few others . . . It is very flattering to read such
things about one’s self as this choice quotation I have picked out at random: “If
any so-called ‘long-hair’ musician really wants to be able to distinguish Ellington’s
band from any other he needs to only listen for the one that sounds most like
Rimsky-Korsakov” . . . I could no more compose like Brahms than he could beat
out the jive in a 52nd Street night spot. So let’s forget about comparisons and leave
each man to his trade, huh?84
From the evidence of extant William Morris Agency press packets of the
later 1940s, in his postwar publicity, both Ellington’s Carnegie Hall appear-
ances and his premieres of extended concert works at these events were
82 Duke Ellington, “The Duke Steps Out,” Rhythm (March 1931), 20–2; reprinted in Tucker,
Reader, 49–50.
83 See Howland, Uptown.
84 Duke Ellington, “Certainly It’s Music!,” Listen (October 1944), 5–6. From the Ellington
Clipping Scrapbooks, 1931–1973, housed at the Duke Ellington Collection.
generally taken for granted and not routinely presented with the type of
classical comparative rhetoric that accompanied the first concert of this
series in 1943. Nevertheless, the classically biased Ellington criticism of
the 1930s was still regularly employed in postwar promotional materials
for Ellington, albeit in a much more diluted fashion. In the press manual
that promoted Ellington’s post-Carnegie Hall concert tour of 1946, for
instance, comparative references to classical music were still actively used
to maintain an aura of cultural prestige around Ellington, although in this
later era these references more frequently appear in the simple context
of name-dropping, whereby press materials mention various figures who
had acclaimed Ellington. A prime illustration of this postwar practice can
be seen in this 1946 description of a staged media event at Ellington’s first
Carnegie Hall concert of 1943: “In honor of the event and in tribute to
Ellington’s genius he was presented with a plaque, containing the signa-
tures of Leopold Stokowski, Deems Taylor, Fritz Reiner, Artur Rodzinski,
Walter Damrosch, and some twenty-five others.”85 Even in this era, the
cultural affirmation of the classical community was still an important
ingredient in the promotion of Ellington’s compositional and concert hall
achievements. When the 1930s criticism of Lambert, Darrell, Winthrop
Sargeant, and other Ellington proponents is referenced in postwar promo-
tional materials, however, these appropriations take a somewhat different
form than they had in the 1930s and early 1940s. The 1946 press packet, for
instance, is far less invested in the cultural authority of this criticism, as can
be seen in a passage that states: “In Europe, Ellington gave concerts which
were listened to and commented upon as seriously as one listens to a Bach
or Beethoven composition. The programs were annotated in scholarly
style. Learned implications were read into his compositions.”86 Despite
the more humble tone of this last statement (where “learned implications
were read into his compositions”), in several instances, the 1946 William
Morris manual repeats almost verbatim from a number of the Lambert-
and Grainger-themed paragraphs that were used in the 1938 manual. This
occurs, for example, in a made-for-use article entitled “Ellington’s Music
[Is] an Art Form,” that employs the same sort of highbrow affirmation
construct that was used in Ellington’s 1930s publicity. By contrast, in a
press snippet entitled “Immortal Gershwin Pays Tribute to the Duke,”
it is clear that the earlier Gershwin/Ellington comparison still carried
85 William Morris Agency, Press Manual, 1946, from a series of pages entitled “Ellington’s
Concerts Attract Wide Acclaim,” 1. From the Duke Ellington Collection.
86 Ibid., from a series of pages entitled, “Duke Ellington a National Favorite,” 1.
70 john howland
significant cultural cachet in the postwar promotion of Ellington. The

manual states, for instance, that “the compliment to his music that the
Duke values most highly . . . is that paid [to] him by the renowned George
Gershwin” (the quotation concerns Gershwin’s prizing of his Ellington
recordings and sheet music).87
Reflections on Contemporary Ellingtonia

(the Past in the Present)
As noted, this period middlebrow symphonic-jazz and artful-

entertainment promotional rhetoric has clearly informed Ellingtonia in
jazz historiography. As stated, following his 1999 centennial, there has
been a growing wave of new research devoted to Duke Ellington. Among
the more recent publications is Terry Teachout’s Duke: A Life of Duke
Ellington, which the author describes as “not so much a work of schol-
arship as an act of synthesis, a narrative biography . . . based on the work
of . . . scholars . . . [who] have unearthed a wealth of new information.”88
This book’s mixed reception in the press and blogosphere allows for some
useful quick reflections on contemporary “Ellingtonia.”
Duke is the first trade biography of Ellington since 2001. Teachout
contends that his is the first biography to consider Ellington’s broader
role in American arts and culture, though this aim is likewise central to
Harvey Cohen’s 2010 Duke Ellington’s America.89 While reviews routinely
praise Duke in this area, critics take issue with the book’s frank accounts
of Ellington’s character, his propensity to procrastinate and to take credit
for the work of others, and what Teachout sees as Ellington’s failings
with extended works. The book’s work as a critical biography introduces
significant authorial opinion (another point of criticism) while at the
same time it hits all the key marks of this favorite jazz history story,
by reframing, expanding, and occasionally debunking often-recounted
biographical details. In certain respects, the book offers an important
corrective to various earlier biographies, but it also reflects a tradition.
Jazz Studies attracts many sorts of passionate researchers from the pro-
fessional to the amateur. The flashpoints of this community’s interpersonal
politics often center on figures like Ellington, particularly in response to
87 Ibid., from a page entitled “Immortal Gershwin Pays Tribute to the Duke.”
88 Terry Teachout, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (New York: Gotham, 2013), 363.
89 Cohen, America.
biographies. Among the most sacred ground of Ellingtonia is the posi-

tioning of Ellington as a pillar of the jazz canon and a “genius” composer
“beyond category.” As demonstrated, such themes began with the late
1920s marketing promotion of Ellington’s manager, Irving Mills, and
quickly entered early jazz criticism. These tropes were further refined in
post-1950 scholarship that helped jazz to enter the academy as a respected
musical art. In sum, Ellington’s centrality to Jazz Studies has much to do
with his historiographic construct as THE quintessential jazz composer.
Recent writings have enriched and expanded the discourse range of
Ellington studies. However, while Cohen and Teachout provide impor-
tant new thoughts on the commercial strategies behind the Mills/Ellington
marketing plan, I find that both authors largely perpetuate the aforemen-
tioned essentialized view of interwar musical culture as either high (elite
“classical” music) or low (jazz and popular music), without really con-
sidering the many class nuances that Ellington negotiated between these
stereotypes.
The strongest criticism against Duke comes from the Ellington “true
believers,” which include the Duke Ellington Society’s William McFadden,
who characterizes Duke as “the most unsettlingly harsh Ellington biogra-
phy,” warning that “serious aficionados will find its contents disturbing.”90
Blogger Steven Cera similarly contends that Teachout portrays “Duke as a
master of deception, a procrastinator . . . a robber of the work of others, a
self-taught musician who lacked conservatory training and . . . a supreme
egotist.”91 By contrast, the Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson posted one
of the more thoughtful blog responses to the book.92 Like many print
critics, despite his ambivalence about specific issues, Iverson praises the
book’s historical framing through the lens of “all of twentieth-century art
and pop culture.” Iverson considers two “bumbling,” self-serving book
reviews (in the New York Times and The New Yorker), and provides an
interview with Teachout and his own well-argued disagreements.93 While
90 William McFadden, review “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout,” Washington
Post, January 2014, reprinted http://villesville.blogspot.se/2014 01 01 archive.html (accessed
18 May 2016).
91 Steven Cera, “Terry and the Duke,” Jazz Profiles, 16 December 2013, http://jazzprofiles
.blogspot.se/2013/12/terry-and-duke.html (accessed 18 May 2016).
92 Ethan Iverson, “Interview with Terry Teachout,” Do the Math, 6 January 2014, https://
ethaniverson.com/interview-with-terry-teachout/ (accessed 14 January 2017).
93 James Gavin, “Big Band: Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout,” New York Times, 6
December 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/books/review/
duke-a-life-of-duke-ellington-by-terry-teachout.html? r=3&, and Adam Gopnik, “Two
Bands: Duke Ellington, the Beatles, and the Mysteries of Modern Creativity,” The New Yorker,
72 john howland
noting that the way Teachout “discusses Ellington is not like any jazz player
I’ve ever known,” Iverson further muses that Teachout “looks at Duke as a
composer first, and maybe Terry’s right, that Duke really aspired to be that
kind of Great Composer. It certainly seems like . . . the gatekeepers wanted
him to be the ‘hot Bach’” (a direct reference to the aforementioned 1944
New Yorker article).
My own Ellington research has focused on the pre-1950 extended com-
positions, seeking to understand this music and its cultural context, espe-
cially in relation to interwar entertainment and concert music. I was
pleased to see some of my work reflected in Teachout’s “synthesis.” How-
ever, a repeated complaint against the book lies in its negative assessments
of these same extended works. For example, both Howard Reich94 and
Iverson take Teachout to task for his statements concerning Ellington’s
supposed failings for not knowing “elementary principles of symphonic
musical organization,” and his claims that Ellington was not suited to
“large-scale . . . organically developed musical structure” (to which Iver-
son quips “I’ve never hung out with a great jazz musician who doubted
Duke’s grasp of form”).95 Elsewhere, Teachout adds that “What Elling-
ton’s large-scale works . . . sound like is theatrical production numbers
[and] . . . those aren’t very effective musical models.”96
One jazz-writer/blogger intriguingly called Teachout a “professional
middlebrow.”97 While this was intended as an insult, I want to stress that
“middlebrow” is not necessarily a pejorative, as this idea captures key
historical notions of social aspiration and cultural power, and it invokes
associative markers of self-conscious sophistication, glamor, and class
(social class and the high–low mixed adjective, “classy”). That said, the
tone of these “opinionated” areas of Teachout’s prose are somewhat mid-
century middlebrow. Teachout’s approach here reminds me of the 1960s
writing style of jazz historian Gunther Schuller, who similarly employed
23 and 30 December 2013, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/two-bands (both

accessed 18 May 2016).
94 Howard Reich, “Review: Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington by Terry Teachout, Teachout’s Flawed
Attempt to Deconstruct a Genius,” Chicago Tribune, 10 November 2013, http://articles
.chicagotribune.com/2013-11-10/features/ct-prj-1110-duke-terry-teachout-20131110 1
edward-kennedy-ellington-billy-strayhorn-printers-row-journal (accessed 14 January 2017).
95 Iverson, “Interview.”
96 Darcy James Argue, “Arranging Ellington: Interview with Terry Teachout,” Carnegie Hall
Musical Exchange, http://musicalexchange.carnegiehall.org/profiles/blogs/
arranging-ellington-interview-with-terry-teachout (accessed 18 May 2016).
97 Larry Kart, “Terry Teachout’s Duke: Any Thoughts?,” Organissimo: Jazz Forums, 6 November
2013, www.organissimo.org/forum/index.php?/topic/
74595-terry-teachouts-duke-any-thoughts/ (accessed 18 May 2016).
classical formal rhetoric (“organic” development, etc.), style analysis as a

weapon for value judgment, and displays of topical thoroughness (sug-
gesting “I’ve examined everything!”) to reinforce his writerly authority.98
A companion element is the too-quick dismissal of non-jazz vernacular
arranging traditions (e.g., production numbers) without consideration
of relevant interwar jazz and pop connections to a wealth of concert-
style music across stage, screen, recordings, and radio.99 Many top-name
Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood, and big band musicians contributed
to this trend, as can be seen in Meredith (“Music Man”) Willson’s 1941
Decca album, Modern American Music, a project tied to Willson’s Maxwell
House radio program which premiered the lushly orchestrated tracks on
the album, including Ellington’s Whitemanesque composition, “American
Lullaby,” alongside compositions from Vernon Duke, Harold Arlen, Harry
Warren, Ferde Grofé, and others.100 Beyond brief considerations of George
Gershwin and Paul Whiteman, neither Teachout nor Cohen consider such
trends or the pops orchestra tradition, both of which are important mid-
dlebrow contexts for understanding both Ellington’s extended works and
Ellington the composer in pre-1950 marketing. More importantly, this
interwar artful-entertainment rhetoric needs to be understood in its full
popular-culture context of the abundant interwar popular-culture tropes
that juxtapose the cultural, class, race, and musical markers associated with
“classical” and “jazz,” such as the Ellington band’s aforementioned Holly-
wood cameo role in the “Rape of a Rhapsody” production number. Such
prime examples of period artful entertainment invite far less essentialized
readings of brow discourse through their tongue-in-cheek presentations
of both the “Great Composer” (Liszt) and Ellington’s composerly image.
Conclusion
Were areas of Ellington’s interwar music – pre-Carnegie Hall and Black,

Brown and Beige – somehow middlebrow?101 I stop short of saying this.
98 See, for example, Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Development, rev. ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986).
99 See Howland, Between the Muses, and John Wriggle, Blue Rhythm Fantasy: Big-Band Jazz
Arranging in the Swing Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).
100 Decca Presents an Album of Modern American Music Played by Meredith Willson and His
Concert Orchestra, Decca Album 219, 1941, 78 rpm (3 discs). Duke Ellington, “American
Lullaby”(New York: Robbins Music, 1942).
101 For an extended discussion of the formal connections between Ellington and Whitemanesque
symphonic jazz, see Howland, Uptown.
74 john howland
Surely Ellington was complicit in his aspirational framing as a (semi) “seri-

ous” Composer (with a capital “C”), and his pursuit of a concert music
ideal in a popular culture context was likewise squarely overlapping with –
and at times in direct dialog with – Whitemanesque middlebrowism. And
surely there is such a thing as an interwar African American middle-
browism that parallels and partakes of white middlebrow culture. But the
sophisticated, artful music of the Ellington orchestra overall – including
his concert-styled music, even despite its often middlebrow criticism and
marketing by white proponents – is difficult to nail down as somehow being
directly middlebrow in the classic interwar and midcentury manner of the
music of Kostelanetz or Whiteman. In this Ellingtonia, there is a witty,
self-aware, distinctly African American critical and stylistic distance that
is somewhat akin to the hip-but-playfully-deconstructive “Ebony Rhap-
sody” composerly portrayal. While midcentury middlebrow discourse is
surely part of his interwar artistic persona and image, I sense that this
signifying distance is a signal difference that makes it stand apart from
the areas of middlebrow musical and cultural discourse that it otherwise
directly engages with.
As discussed above, as well as elsewhere in this volume, Ellington devel-
oped a cross-class popular image built on an amalgam of high–low cultural
symbols that presented a refined, commercially savvy musician, enter-
tainer, and businessman who wrote hip but “serious” (and/or “sophisti-
cated”) popular music, on the one hand, and a lauded, “serious” concert
music composer, on the other hand. At the center of midcentury jazz-
is-art discourse, in an era where educators, aesthetes, and professional
musicians typically restricted “composition” to mean traditional high-
culture music (as opposed to the work of “tunesmiths,” “songwriters,”
“arrangers,” etc.), Ellington’s extended works presented artful expressions
of black urbanity and modernity through their rich juxtapositions of black
and white vernacular and cultivated music traditions. The popular ascrip-
tion of “composer” to Ellington was a major victory for proponents of
jazz as art, and (as noted) is central to the rhetoric of the “true Ellington
believers.” What this discourse and Teachout’s narrative synthesis in Duke
reveal are the continuing tensions within Ellingtonia between generations
of invested individuals, older and more recent views on jazz as art, and
mixed-class understandings of jazz composition.
Iverson astutely suggests that “part of Duke’s genius was to mean many
different things to so many different people.” I agree. Teachout’s biogra-
phy has great value as an historical corrective/update and a synthesis of
certain areas of recent Ellington studies. In the end, I think of Kenneth
Prouty’s comments on the jazz canon: “The canon survives because it is the
basic historical language of the musical academy . . . It has its uses . . . [even
despite our] qualification[s], [and] a metaphorical ‘but there’s more to
it.’”102 Teachout’s book offers a sort of biographical “changing same” (to
paraphrase Amiri Baraka) – he redraws core familiar stories that many
have found great meaning in. The critical response has predictably found
important faults and added its “but there’s more to it!” commentary,
even while knowing that biographies rarely tell the whole story, partic-
ularly with an individual whose private life was as elusive and multi-
sided as Ellington’s. Ellington continues to attract such invested engage-
ment because he attained such a remarkable synthesis of cross-cultural
impact, media savvy, racial and social relevance, and undeniably artful
entertainment.
102 Kenneth E. Prouty, “Toward Jazz’s ‘Official’ History: The Debates and Discourses of Jazz
History Textbooks,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 1 (Fall 2010), www.ams-net.org/ojs/
index.php/jmhp/article/view/4/26 (accessed 18 May 2016).
3 “Art or Debauchery?”: The Reception of
Ellington in the U.K.
catherine tackley
In a 1952 Down Beat article, Duke Ellington chose his opening night at
the London Palladium as one of his “10 Top Thrills in 25 Years,” and
commented that “the entire first European tour in 1933 was a tremen-
dous uplift for all our spirits.”1 Certainly, the reviews of Ellington’s initial
performances in the U.K. were generally positive, which was definitely
not the case with Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway, who each visited
around the same time. However, there are nuances in the writing pub-
lished in response to Ellington’s visit which tell us not only about the
performances themselves, including details that are otherwise unobtain-
able, but also about British attitudes to jazz. This chapter explores the
impact of Duke Ellington in the U.K., focusing on his 1933 tour of the
country, his 1948 appearances without his orchestra, his performances
at the Royal Festival Hall and the Leeds Festival in 1958, and, finally, the
three Sacred Concerts which were staged in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.2
These performances, which span Ellington’s career, took place in a range
of performance situations and across different regions of the U.K. While
the artistic inspiration that global touring offered to Ellington has been
considered elsewhere,3 this chapter will explore the British reception of
Ellington’s developing musical style and his influence on the British jazz
community during this forty-year period, contributing to the growing
knowledge and understanding of the attitudes to jazz in different periods,
places, and situations.
1 Duke Ellington, “Duke Tells of 10 Top Thrills in 25 Years,” Down Beat, 5 November 1952, 1.
Ellington’s appearances at the London Palladium in 1933 are considered in detail in chapter 9 of
the author’s (née Catherine Parsonage) The Evolution of Jazz in Britain, 1880–1935 (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005). The title of this chapter is a reference to an article written by Stanley Nelson for
the British theatrical trade paper, The Era, in response to Ellington’s 1933 visit: Stanley R.
Nelson, “Ellington and After! Art or Debauchery?,” Era, 21 June 1933: 3.
2 I acknowledge the valuable work of Howard Rye in reconstructing detailed tour itineraries for
many visiting American groups, including Ellington in 1933. See Howard Rye, “Visiting
Firemen 1: Duke Ellington,” Storyville, 88 (April 1980): 128–30.
3 See, for example, Brian Priestley “Ellington Abroad,” in The Cambridge Companion to Duke
Ellington, ed. Ed Green (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 55–66.
76
“Art or Debauchery?” 77
The 1933 Tour
Duke Ellington and his orchestra arrived in the U.K. on 12 June 1933, and
departed for the continent on 24 July of the same year. The group was
resident at variety halls in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Glasgow,
and also played Sunday concerts (a concert was the only form of enter-
tainment legally permitted to take place on Sundays in Britain at this time)
and late night dances at other venues. They broadcast on the BBC and
recorded for Decca in London. Given the number of engagements and the
distances involved, it is hard to imagine that the musicians would have
agreed with Irving Mills’s initial assertion that “the proposed trip is more
in the nature of a holiday . . . a break and a change of scenery.”4 Despite
the considerable demographic differences between the cities visited on the
tour, research using local newspapers illuminates a relatively consistent
and positive attitude to Ellington across the country. One reason for this
was the degree of advance publicity which his visit received, meaning that
critics and audience alike had a good idea of what to expect. Ellington
had been anticipated in the trade press for at least seven months prior to
his arrival, and new details of the tour were confirmed in Melody Maker
each subsequent month.5 The British musician and critic Spike Hughes
was able to play a significant role in the build-up to Ellington’s appear-
ances. Hughes published accounts of his experiences in America in Melody
Maker, the foremost British music trade periodical, and one of these arti-
cles included a description of Ellington performing at the Cotton Club.6
The day after Ellington’s arrival, and in anticipation of the band’s BBC
broadcast, an article by Hughes entitled “Meet the Duke” was published
in the Daily Herald, one of the best-selling daily newspapers in Britain at
the time.7
The consistency in language between many British reviews and a con-
temporary advertising manual issued around this time illuminates the role
of Mills in ensuring that the British press was well briefed.8 Mills was prob-
ably also involved in a piece supposedly written by Ellington which was
published in the British Rhythm magazine just prior to his arrival. Related
coverage included subsequent features in the trade press “written by”
4 “Ellington for Us – Spike for U.S.,” Melody Maker, January 1933, 66.
5 Parsonage, Evolution, 228–30.
6 Spike Hughes, “Day by Day in New York,” Melody Maker, May 1933, 353.
7 Spike Hughes, “Meet the Duke,” Daily Herald, 13 June 1933, 8.
8 Nicholson, Reminiscing, 152–9.
78 catherine tackley
individual musicians from the band, as well as numerous tie-ups with

instrument manufacturers and record shops, the most enterprising of
which has to be Ellington’s endorsement of haggis in Glasgow.9 Of partic-
ular interest is Mills’s insistence that Ellington should be presented as “a
great artist, a music genius whose unique style and individual theories of
harmony have created a new music.”10 Much of the early British writing
on jazz shares the common feature of the use of classical music to provide
the criteria against which jazz was evaluated.11 Although the importance
of individual improvising musicians was increasingly recognized in British
criticism (especially in Stanley Nelson’s 1934 book, All About Jazz, which
includes comparative discussion of different British and American musi-
cians), there was still a tendency to look towards composers to improve
the basic material upon which jazz was built. This idea is carried through
specifically in early British writing on Ellington in which he is identified
as “the first genuine composer of jazz,” and “the first jazz composer of
distinction, and the first Negro composer of distinction.”12 Although the
individual musicians of Ellington’s band were introduced to the British
public in numerous articles and programs, Hughes tended to adhere to the
conventional idea of the subservience of the performers to the composer:
“There is not a note which comes from the remarkable brass section,
or from that rich tone of the saxes, that is not directly an expression of
Duke’s genius.”13 While the cognoscenti – headed by Hughes and the
British composer and critic Constant Lambert – had specific expecta-
tions of Ellington’s performances, many others drew more readily upon
their general experiences of dance or jazz bands in specific performance
settings – in variety entertainment, on the radio, in the dance hall, and
in concert. To a large extent, Ellington’s initial reception in Britain was
dependent on how he conformed to, subverted, or revolutionized the
conventions of these performance contexts.
Variety Shows
In 1933, Ellington and his band spent most of their time in Britain per-
forming as an individual act in larger variety theater shows, where they
were generally well received. Dance bands had been appearing on the
9 Duke Ellington, “‘I’ll Be Seeing You!’ Says Ellington,” Rhythm, June 1933, 34–6; also see Rye,
“Visiting Firemen 1,” 129.
10 Nicholson, Reminiscing, 153. 11 Parsonage, Evolution, 53–4.
12 Hughes, “Meet the Duke,” 8, and Constant Lambert, Music Ho! (London: Faber, 1934; reprint
1966), 187.
13 Hughes, “Day by Day,” 353.
British variety stage for many years and there were clear audience expecta-
tions of this type of “act,” as the bandleader Jack Hylton noted in an article
for the Radio Times: “Scenic backgrounds and artistic effects are useful to
a stage band, but easy good humour and a fair leavening of comedy is a
necessity, because no music-hall audience can be kept serious for a long
time without signs of restiveness. They pay to be entertained.”14 Ellington
and his band appeared at the Palladium alongside acts such as skating,
juggling, comedy, Arab acrobatics, patter dialogue, ventriloquism, a foot-
ball match on bicycles, and the risqué comedian Max Miller. With this
context in mind, it is unsurprising that Hughes felt the need to point out
in the Daily Herald that Ellington’s “is not a ‘show’ band; its members
do not wear funny hats, nor do they attempt any ‘comedy.’”15 However,
Ellington was clearly well prepared for the variety halls with the inclu-
sion of vocalist Ivie Anderson, Bessie Dudley (“The Original Snake-Hips
Girl”), and tap dancers Bill Bailey and Derby Wilson in the touring group.
These additional entertainers contributed visual interest to the band’s
performances.16 Predictably, knowledgeable critics disapproved of these
aspects of the performances which seemed “to be so unnecessary as they
detracted from the performances of the band.” Although the quality of
Anderson’s performances was acknowledged, she too “seemed to inter-
fere with the band.” Moreover, Melody Maker’s correspondent (probably
Hughes) was frustrated that the band had to play stop-times for the tap
dancing.17 Lambert commented similarly that “It is a little irritating to see
them [the band] reduced to a subordinate role for the sake of a cabaret
turn.”18
Most other reviews tended to comment on the singing, dancing, and
visual aspects of the act rather than the band’s performance. Such writings
often carefully noted various non-musical details, such as in their first
week at the Palladium when the band wore light grey tail suits, and in
the second, white tail coats with green trousers. Certainly, the visual effect
was stunning, but such elements were crucially paired with the highest
musical standards, as the Evening Standard reported on the opening night
at the Palladium:
There are subdued lights and monstrous shadows. His jazz drummer has the flam-
boyance of a cocktail mixer. His trumpeters abandon themselves in a frenzy. Yet,
14 Jack Hylton, “The Dance Orchestra in Vaudeville,” Radio Times, 8 February 1929, 319.
15 “Variety News,” Performer, 14 June 1933, 4; Hughes, “Meet the Duke,” 8.
16 “The Duke at the Palladium: Long Awaited Debut to Packed Houses,” Melody Maker, 17 June
1933, 2.
17 Ibid., 1–2. 18 Constant Lambert, “Matters Musical,” Sunday Referee, 25 June 1933, 18.
stripped of all its ornamentation, his band has great technical skill, and under his
direction carries jazz to a high degree of syncopation and “hot” rhythm.19
Vital to the audiences’ acceptance of “frenzied” trumpeters was the per-

ception of Ellington as an effortless showman who was in control of all
aspects of the performance: “The calm, collected Ellington, [was] sitting at
the piano, playing and directing his mighty band, without any ostensible
effort whatever.”20 There are two contextual points to be made here. First,
Ellington’s visit followed hot on the heels of Armstrong (who also appeared
at the Palladium), whose stage presence many Britons considered to be
excessive. Secondly, the prominent style of dance band directing at the time
was noticeable exertion with a baton; in comparison, Ellington’s direction
must have appeared almost magical. An editorial in Rhythm magazine
admired Ellington’s “Whispering Tiger,” the antithesis of many British
performances of the early jazz standard Tiger Rag (which was introduced
to Britain by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band), noting: “Never have I
heard men play so perfectly together, with such thorough understanding
and so perfectly effortless.”21
The reaction in some of the national newspapers was more muted than
the specialist publications: “In short, a very good dance band, playing
ingeniously orchestrated music. I do not pretend to appreciate its merits
to the point of fashionable ecstasy; but I like it – as a dance band.”22
Similarly, the Liverpool papers in particular referred to Ellington’s per-
formance as a “stunt,” albeit an effective one, showing how in a variety
context Ellington appeared to be just the latest novelty: “It is a highly
stylised, hy[p]er-sophisticated stunt, staged with a subtly satirical mod-
ernistic setting, and put over with the last ounce of showmanship.”23
Although the basic format of Ellington’s performance broadly conformed
to the expectations of a variety show act, the obvious differences between
the sound of Ellington’s band and British dance orchestras meant that for
some the music was virtually incomprehensible: “as fascinating and inex-
plicable as a congress of ship’s sirens, motor horns and pneumatic drills in
the majority of his numbers, and sublimely beautiful in Mood Indigo.”24
For the reviewer in the Glasgow Evening News, Ellington’s performance
19 “London After Dark: Varieties,” Evening Standard, 13 June 1933, 9.

20 “Editorial: Amazing Ellington,” Rhythm, July 1933, 9. 21 Ibid.
22 “The Duke at the Palladium: Composer-Conductor of All Black Band,” Daily Express, 13 June
1933, 11.
23 “Round the Theatres,” Liverpool Echo, 27 June 1933, 10.
24 “Duke Ellington’s Triumph at the Holborn Empire,” Era, 12 July 1933, 20.
went beyond all expectations of a dance band: “Ellington has carried syn-
copation to subtleties which the popular little Lancashire lad [Hylton] has
never risked. Curiously enough, the gramophone has not conveyed much
of this band’s virtuosity. You have to sit before it to grasp the multitude
of sounds that its instruments can achieve.”25 Even for fans of Ellington’s
music, the experience of hearing the band live was considerably more
intense in comparison with recordings: “You all know how Ellington’s
band plays through listening to his records, and I can only say that in
the flesh, it is like that, only a thousand times more so. It literally lifts
one out of one’s seat.”26 However, due to familiarity with his recordings,
the experience of hearing Ellington live was unsettling for some: “I came
across to England to hear Ellington, and I returned, severely doubting the
genius that had been attributed to him. Long after midnight, however, I
played over five of his records, of my own choosing, and retired to bed –
reassured.”27
With all the advance publicity in Rhythm and Melody Maker, it is not
surprising that many musicians and jazz fans, such as Stanley Nelson,
reacted ecstatically to the performances:
How to describe in so many words the most vital, emotional experience that
vaudeville in England has ever known? An orgy of masochism, a ruthless exercise in
sensuality . . . it mined deep the fundamentals of every human in that multitudinous
audience . . . Here was music far removed from the abracadabra of the symphony;
here was a tenuous melodic line which distilled from the emotions all heritage of
human sorrow which lies deep in every one of us.28
Many of those who were most familiar with Ellington’s work were critical
of his choice of repertoire for the Palladium shows, which was perceived
to be overly commercial.29 There was, however, overwhelming consensus
about the quality of Mood Indigo, which Ellington used to close his per-
formances. The reviewer in the Liverpool Evening Express referred to this
number as “Blue Indigo,” a “captivating waltz tune.”30 This error belies
the appreciation of Mood Indigo as a new type of “sweet” number still
beloved in Britain and typified by the waltz, but yet the distinctive orches-
tration and blues basis also rendered this acceptable to more discerning
25 “So This Is Harlem!,” Glasgow Evening News, 4 July 1933, 3.

26 “The Duke at the Palladium,” Melody Maker, 1.
27 “Readers Views on the Ellington Concert,” Melody Maker, 15 July 1933, 14.
28 Stanley R. Nelson, “Ellington Over London!: Introspection in Indigo,” Era, 14 June 1933, 1.
29 “The Duke at the Palladium,” Melody Maker, 1–2.
30 “Revue and Variety on Merseyside,” Liverpool Evening Express, 27 June 1933, 8.
listeners. Similarly, overall, Ellington managed to achieve performances

which conformed to the British idea of a “band act,” fulfilling the demand
for novel but yet good-quality entertainment.
Broadcasts
Ellington broadcast a very brief interview with Jack Hylton on BBC radio
on the evening of his arrival in Britain, but his main opportunity to reach
the whole nation came a few days later. There were high expectations
surrounding this broadcast, which would have had an impact on potential
provincial audiences who had not yet been able to hear the band in
person. In fact, the broadcast had the most controversial reception of all
Ellington’s activities in 1933, as exemplified by the reaction published in
the Manchester Guardian the following day:
There are those who make a cult of “hot” music and think that its opponents
misunderstand it, but when all arguments are finished it is surely true to say that
something that is thoroughly ugly from start to finish is fairly to be opposed. Even
if the “music” would be more bearable if the words were not so stupid and if the
ideas which exist vaguely behind it were not so pathetically crude.31
Similarly, Nelson claimed in his “Art or Debauchery” article that “with just
one exception, every layman I have questioned concerning the Ellington
broadcast disliked it.”32 Such strong reactions to a broadcast might seem
surprising, but it should be remembered that the BBC had pursued a policy
of broadcasting tightly regulated “dance music” since its inception. Indeed,
the overriding BBC policy on jazz and popular music remained constant,
fuelled by the recent appointment of Henry Hall as the director of the BBC
Dance Band. Executives hoped Hall would maintain a suitably controlled
version of popular music, within which jazz was usually subsumed. With
this in mind, it is maybe not surprising that in the “Radio Reports” column
of Melody Maker, the main criticism of Ellington’s broadcast was that “the
arrangements seemed too heavy and complicated for the air, there was so
much going on all at once that this was difficult to sort it out.”33 Indeed,
the critic for the Yorkshire Observer commented “Duke Ellington I suffered
for 15 min. and then switched off. Give me Henry Hall every time.”34
In March 1933, just a couple of months before Ellington’s visit, two
significant articles on jazz appeared in a special “Dance Music” issue of
31 “Wireless Notes,” Manchester Guardian, 15 June 1933, 12.

32 Nelson, “Ellington and After!,” 3. 33 “Radio Reports,” Melody Maker, 24 June 1933, 7.
34 Quoted in Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington (London: Musicians Press, 1946), 139.
the Radio Times, the BBC’s magazine. Lawrence Duval’s article, entitled
“The Genesis of Jazz,” traces the black origins of jazz through folk music,
minstrelsy, ragtime, and (unusually for British writing at this time) the
blues.35 Lambert developed his article “The Future of Highbrow Jazz”
for his 1934 book Music Ho!36 Given that the Radio Times was often
used to support the BBC’s programming decisions, it seems likely that
the inclusion of these articles was to prepare the ground for Ellington to
broadcast during his time in Britain. As usual, the magazine printed a
diverse selection of listeners’ comments following Ellington’s broadcast,
ranging from “It was the greatest three-quarters of an hour I have listened
to,” to “I am forced to protest most strongly against our good English air
being polluted by Duke Ellington and his famous orchestra.”37 This was
entirely typical of the BBC’s tendency to justify controversial decisions by
proving that it was impossible for them to please everyone all of the time.
Dances
The third type of engagement that Ellington fulfilled during his time in
Britain was to play for dances in Streatham (south London), Brighton (on
the south coast), and Bolton (north of Manchester), as well as in clubs in
each of the major cities on the tour. There had been a dramatic increase in
dance venues in Britain following World War One; some were converted
from ice and roller skating rinks, others were purpose-built. Outside
London, the music was usually provided by a local dance band playing
stock arrangements and occasionally by famous, London-based bands
such as Jack Hylton’s. The popularity of Ellington’s dance engagements is
not surprising considering that rather than having to sit through a dozen
acts on a variety bill for a brief segment of Ellington, the band could be
heard for much longer and in less formal surroundings than a theater.
Indeed, while in variety and in concert the performances and audience
reactions had been controlled by the physical confines of a theater, at
dances, journalists reported something akin to the furor which attends
modern-day pop stars:
The dance which took place at the Streatham Locarno last Friday (June 16) was
a literal riot. Enormous crowds besieged the door and some people got forced in
35 Lawrence Duval, “The Genesis of Jazz and the Birth of the Blues,” Radio Times, 17 March 1933,
658.
36 Constant Lambert, “The Future of Highbrow Jazz,” Radio Times, 17 March 1933, 659.
37 Quoted in A. H. Lawrence, Duke Ellington and His World (New York: Routledge, 2001), 205.
without paying. The attendance looked to be in the neighbourhood of 4,000, of

whom hardly anybody attempted to dance to the band. They just crowded around
the stand and cheered themselves hoarse.38
Many accounts of Ellington’s dance hall performances mention audiences

crowding around the bandstand in a manner that would not be possible or
acceptable in theaters. Ellington’s dance at the Grafton Rooms in Liverpool
was highly anticipated in the local community, and a special souvenir
brochure was produced. A piece in the Liverpool Echo pointed out that
the late-night performance would be significant in allowing “musicians,
members of the profession and other experts” to experience the impact of
Ellington’s music in the ballroom.39 Although traditional couple dancing
remained the norm at this time,
At no time during the evening, although there were about 1000 people present,
did the number of couples dancing exceed one hundred. The majority remained
throughout the session packed solidly around the band platform fascinated by the
amazing skill and virtuosity of the musicians . . . It was quite apparent that most
people were intent on seeing the band in action, and having a close-up view, than
of testing its adaptability for dancing purposes.40
The lack of dancing to Ellington indicates that audiences differentiated

his band from other ensembles providing the music in these venues. By
actively choosing listening over dancing, these audiences reflected in their
behavior the growth of a contemporary distinction between “hot” jazz and
dance music.41 As the Liverpool Echo put it: “They certainly conquered the
dancers, but not from a dancing point of view.”42
Concerts
Ellington gave several Sunday concerts while in the U.K., including some
at relatively prestigious regional venues such as the Blackpool Tower ball-
room and the Royal Hall in Harrogate, as well as two sponsored by Melody
Maker at the New Trocadero Cinema in Elephant and Castle, which lies
south of the River Thames in London. The latter were intended specifically
for musicians and enthusiasts. Many of these events attracted audiences
of 3,000–4,000 people. The first Melody Maker concert was announced in
38 “Ellington Fever Peak,” Melody Maker, 24 June 1933, 2.

39 “Ballroom vs. Stage,” Liverpool Echo, 28 June 1933, 6.
40 “Dancing on Merseyside,” Liverpool Echo, 5 July 1933, 4.
41 See Parsonage, Evolution, 191ff. 42 “Dancing on Merseyside,” Liverpool Echo, 4.
the publication in May and had sold out even before Ellington arrived in
London. This strong interest in these concerts seems to suggest that some
discerning audience members might have been aware of the limitations
that the variety setting placed upon Ellington’s performances. In the days
before the concert, Melody Maker issued instructions in an attempt to
influence a mode of behavior similar to that expected of an audience for
classical music: “May we also suggest that everybody keeps his enthusi-
asm within bounds and refrains from applauding individual solos so that
subsequent sequences may not be drowned. We have promised [Elling-
ton] a quiet and appreciative audience which will know what to expect
and how to listen.”43 The organizers of the concert had invited the record
shop Levy’s of Regent Street to give a hot record recital prior to the band’s
appearance, maybe with the intention of encouraging similarly attentive
listening from the audience when the band came on stage. However, in
the concert, “not only did the applause keep breaking through as each
trumpeter, saxophonist, or trombonist finished each of his little ‘turns’
but even the shrill top notes or rumbling low notes in the middle of a tune
were applauded.”44
Although the audience reception appears to have been very positive,
Hughes and some other readers of Melody Maker were not happy with the
concert. Writing under his critical pseudonym “Mike,” Hughes objected
not only to the applause during numbers, but more fundamentally to the
balance of the program:
Is Duke Ellington losing faith in his own music and turning commercial through
lack of appreciation, or does he honestly under-estimate the English musical public
to such an extent that a concert for musicians does not include The Mooche, Mood
Indigo, Lazy Rhapsody, Blue Ramble, Rockin’ in Rhythm, Creole Love Call, Old Man
Blue, Baby, When You Ain’t There or Black Beauty?45
As implied, Hughes and the organizers of the Melody Maker concerts were
keen to present Ellington in a formal concert situation, complete with a
relatively passive audience. This was commensurate with their desire to
uphold Ellington as a great artist, compatible with the Western art music
canon, as the fundamental basis for appreciating and valuing his music.
Ellington’s performance at the second Melody Maker concert seemed to
satisfy Hughes, who commented that “there is very little for me to say
43 “Ellington Fever,” Melody Maker, 2.

44 “Our London Correspondence,” Manchester Guardian, 26 June 1933, 8.
45 Spike Hughes, “Four Thousand Delighted Fans but ‘Mike’ Is Not so Pleased about It,” Melody
Maker, 1 July 1933, 2.
in the way of criticism . . . Only three pieces played were not actually
Duke Ellington’s compositions.”46 However, although dances and variety
performances in London and elsewhere continued to be well attended,
tickets were available on the door for the second Melody Maker concert,
thus possibly indicating that the rather contrived format may have had
limited appeal to general audiences.
This lack of interest may also illustrate an evolving strand within the
British attitudes to jazz in which its differences with classical music began
to be celebrated rather than suppressed. The presentation of Ellington
and his band in familiar settings served to highlight these musical and
cultural differences, and made a significant contribution to the growing
British understanding of the importance of African American musicians
in jazz. On a basic level, Ellington and his band presented undoubted
exoticism, albeit in a controlled way, for British audiences. It should be
further noted that Mills’s advertising manual encouraged writers to exploit
the “primitive” and “jungle” characteristics of the band’s music:
Mr. Duke Ellington’s overwrought and highly sophisticated cult of the primitive is
one of the most effective stunts that have appeared for a long time on the stage. It is
[as] though he had applied a process of desiccation to the primitive music and tribal
dance which were the far-away origins of the kind of thing he plays. By comparison
with those origins the present entertainment is exceedingly cultivated.47
Beyond this, a more profound appreciation of Ellington was linked with a

better understanding of the context for his music. This is seen, for instance,
in the impressions Hughes had gained through his experiences in Harlem
and then disseminated. The personal accounts in these writings went
beyond a reliance on familiar stereotypes. Several reviewers noted that the
band’s performances were imbued with, and provoked in listeners, deep
emotion. For example, in one Liverpool Echo article it is said that Black
and Tan Fantasy “may express the soul of a submerged race struggling
out of abysmal depression.”48 Similarly, the Liverpool Evening Express
commented that “His music seems to be absolutely alive, primitive and
vital. It expresses the soul of the people.”49 It became clear that Ellington’s
music offered something profoundly different to British dance bands, and
this difference ought to be taken seriously: “We are of the opinion that the
46 Spike Hughes, “Mike’s Report on the Second Ellington Melody Maker Concert,” Melody Maker,
22 July 1933, 3.
47 “Empire Theatre,” Liverpool Post and Mercury, 27 June 1933, 8.
48 “Round the Theatres,” Liverpool Echo, 27 June 1933, 10.
49 “Revue and Variety on Merseyside,” Liverpool Evening Express, 23 June 1933, 10.
time is ripe for the advent of another coloured band in this country, as our
bands have been in a stereotyped rut and it is time that a certain judicious
kick in the pants was administered.”50 This realization had important
practical consequences for British musicians. In a 1933 Melody Maker
article, for instance, one writer notably argues:
Our education, hitherto so woefully neglected, is being attended to. We now have
the opportunity to learn; to emulate, at least, to try to copy. We wonder how many
of our bands and musicians will learn anything! Brass players will, of course, growl
in the accepted Cooty [sic] and [“Tricky”] Sam [Nanton] style, but beyond that, we
fear, little will be learnt. Let us, therefore, all seize these opportunities before they
are too late. Let us not miss an opportunity to hear these visiting celebrities, and to
learn what we can. It is madness and musical suicide not to do so.51
The “Musicians’ Union Ban”

Unfortunately, the opportunities for direct education of British musicians
were limited, as Ellington’s orchestra did not return until 1958. This major
gap was the result of restrictions placed upon American musicians per-
forming in Britain. As I detail elsewhere, this state of affairs had developed
gradually from the mid-1920s, when questions began to be asked about
the presence of American bands in Britain when native musicians were
out of work. This debate gained further momentum in the context of eco-
nomic decline at the end of the decade.52 By the time of Ellington’s 1933
tour, American bands could perform only in variety and dance halls where
the resident British group was retained, and not in restaurants, where free
admission was perceived to deprive British bands playing elsewhere of
their audiences.53 Nevertheless, there were converse U.S.–U.K. musician
employment problems, as seen in press coverage at the time which noted
that even the band of Jack Hylton – a main supporter of Ellington’s visit –
was forbidden from performing in the U.S.A. Hylton probably hoped that
his role in Ellington’s visit might open up reciprocal opportunities for
himself in the States, but when these were not forthcoming, he actually
protested against an application for Ellington to return to Britain in 1934.
The effect of this was to draw the lack of transatlantic reciprocity to the
attention of the British government. A risky strategy was employed by
the Ministry of Labour on the basis that a refusal to grant the necessary
permits for Ellington’s orchestra might influence the American Federation
50 “The Duke to Open at the Palladium on June 12th,” Rhythm, June 1933, 11.
51 “Our Education,” Melody Maker, 22 July 1933, 8.
52 Parsonage, Evolution, 218–20. 53 Ibid., 220.
of Musicians to be more receptive to British bands. Ultimately, this plan

backfired, and in 1935 a stalemate situation was reached whereby neither
British nor American governments would grant permits to bands from
the opposite country.54
Ironically, the lack of “jazz in Britain” following Ellington’s 1933 appear-
ances – in terms of American musicians visiting and touring – acted as
an impetus for the further development of an independent British jazz.
Ellington’s initial visit helped to stimulate British jazz criticism which
would sustain enthusiasts for the music, but the visit also helped to create a
demand for black jazz musicians. This need was met not by African Amer-
icans, but instead by resident and immigrant black Britons and citizens
of the British Empire, particularly West Indian musicians, whose perfor-
mances were certainly more than just imitations of American models.55
Such trends contributed to defining British jazz. In addition, although the
restriction on American musicians from 1935 is often referred to as the
“Musicians’ Union ban,” this development was actually instituted by
the Ministry of Labour, who had jurisdiction over work permits; and
the reality of the so-called “ban” was rather more subtle.56
Certainly, it was virtually impossible for whole bands, British or Amer-
ican, to perform on the opposite side of the Atlantic; but individuals were
able to circumvent the restrictions in various ways. For example, Hylton
received a permit to visit the U.S. as a conductor, but he was also able
to broadcast performances to America both with his band from London,
and even from a ship off the U.S. coast. He was further able to work with
American musicians while the promoter paid for his band to have a two-
week holiday.57 Similarly, American saxophonist Benny Carter worked in
Britain primarily as an arranger, but was able to take a calculated risk
and indulge in a small amount of playing in informal situations such as
nightclubs and “rhythm clubs” (fan-based social clubs organized by hot
music enthusiasts). He also recorded legitimately in the U.K. and even
starred in a Sunday concert organized by Melody Maker.58
54 Ibid., 253–4.
55 Catherine Tackley, “Race, Identity and the Meaning of Jazz in Post-Second World War Britain,”
in Black Music in Post-Second World War Britain, ed. Jon Stratton and Nabeel Zuberi
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014).
56 See the detailed account by Martin Cloonan and Matt Brennan, “Alien Invasions: The British
Musicians’ Union and Foreign Musicians,” Popular Music 32 (2013): 277–95.
57 Parsonage, Evolution, 256.
58 For a more detailed account of Carter’s time in Britain, see Catherine Tackley, “Benny Carter in
Britain, 1936–37,” in Eurojazzland, ed. Luca Cerchiari, Laurent Cugny, and Franz
Kerschbaumer (Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press, 2012), 167–88.
The 1948 Tour
Some American musicians – such as Coleman Hawkins, Fats Waller, and

Art Tatum – obtained permits by presenting themselves as solo cabaret or
variety artists. These situations actually encouraged the visitors to interact
with their British colleagues and thus provided significant educational
opportunities. It was this loophole that allowed Ellington to return Britain
in 1948 as a pianist with singer Kay Davis and Ray Nance, who sang,
danced, and played trumpet and fiddle. The latter’s experience of variety
performance would have been invaluable since the group spent the first
two weeks of their visit at the London Palladium, performing under the
heading “Sepia Panorama,” on a bill which also included comedy singer
Pearl Bailey and the Nicholas brothers tap dancing duo. During this time,
these US entertainers were each accompanied by Woolf Phillips and the
Skyrockets, the Palladium’s resident orchestra, but Ellington’s sheet music
arrived late and the resultant lack of rehearsal led to the first performance
being branded as “scrappy.”59
As in 1933, Ellington’s 1948 U.K. “act” remained largely congruent
with the expectations of mainstream variety theatre. Davis’s songs were
“purely sentimental,” Nance was “an energetic and versatile entertainer,”
and Ellington himself was described as both “a composer of over a thou-
sand of the tunes which crooners croon” and a performer of “intricate
arrangements which are soothing rather than exciting.”60 However, a
review in Billboard (a US publication) suggested that Ellington “appeared
lost without his orchestra” and while Pearl Bailey was accorded a tremen-
dous reception, and was subsequently moved from first to last on the
bill, Ellington “failed to go over with any great enthusiasm. The audi-
ence tried to warm up to his playing but the sparkle of the old Duke just
didn’t seem to pass over the footlights.”61 Unlike his previous visit, Elling-
ton’s 1948 tour was not extensively previewed in the British press. As a
result, at the Palladium, “there was not, on the whole, the number of tried
Ellington enthusiasts present to give Duke the response he is undoubt-
edly accustomed to.”62 British musicians who performed with Ellington
recall the tremendous reception upon his arrival in Paris at the start of the
59 Stuart S. Allen, “London Largo: A Weary Duke Errs by Not Rehearsing with Ork,” Down Beat,
28 July 1948, 2; “Ellington Is Here!,” Melody Maker, 26 June 1948, 1.
60 “Palladium,” The Times (London), 22 June 1948, 7.
61 “Palladium, London,” Billboard, 3 July 1948, 44; “Fallon Trio to Accompany Duke on Concert
Tour,” Melody Maker, 3 July 1948, 1.
62 Ibid.
subsequent tour of mainland Europe, but there were no reports of similar

scenes in connection with his British appearances. Indeed, notification of
his arrival was printed in Melody Maker only on the day of his landing,
and it was later reported that: “As the time of the Duke’s arrival was only
known at the last minute, and only to a few, there was not the crowd that
would normally have turned out to meet him.”63
The British tour which commenced after the Palladium engagement
avoided variety theaters in favor of venues such as the Guildhall in
Southampton, City Hall in Sheffield, the New Opera House in Blackpool,
St. Andrew’s Hall in Glasgow, and King’s Hall, Belle Vue, Manchester,
which were more akin to concert halls than variety theaters or night-
clubs. The program for these engagements was accordingly described as
a concert: “The first half of each concert will feature Duke himself at
the piano, the Jack Fallon Rhythm Trio, British guest artists64 and one of
Duke’s singers. The second half will be the concert version of the Elling-
ton revue.”65 A trio of Canadian expatriot bass player Jack Fallon, British
guitarist Malcolm Mitchell, and drummer Tony Crombie was employed
for the British and continental tour. Undoubtedly, this engagement repre-
sented a great opportunity for these musicians, and Fallon commented at
the time that the experience had been “an education as well as a pleasure.”66
Fallon and Crombie both recall the extensive entourage which accompa-
nied Ellington, including his road manager Al Celly, barber Billy Black,
publisher Jack Robbins, the songwriter Kermit Goell, others whom Crom-
bie termed “court jesters,” and various “ladies” who joined and left along
the way. The British musicians learned and performed some music by
ear, but they also recall Ellington jotting down charts for them. Commen-
surately, the programs included familiar numbers such as Sophisticated
Lady, Caravan, and Solitude, and Fallon recalled performing the more
recent Transblucency, a feature for Davis.67
63 “Duke Ellington Palladium and Concert-Tour Plans,” Melody Maker, 19 June 1948, 1;
“Ellington Is Here!,” 1.
64 For example, the harmonica player Ronald Chesney – who played a largely classical
repertoire – was included at several, if not all, destinations. Fallon and Crombie recall the
Nicholas brothers travelling as part of the Ellington entourage, but it seems unlikely that they
usually performed in the concerts. In Manchester, for example, the brothers performed at the
city’s Palace Theatre. Exceptionally, Fallon remembered Harold Nicholas sitting in for Crombie
on drums on one of the European dates.
65 “Fallon Trio,” 1.
66 Jack Fallon, “Play It as You Feel It, Says Duke,” Melody Maker, 24 July 1948, 3.
67 “Palladium, London,” Billboard, 44; Tony Crombie, interview by Tony Middleton, and Jack
Fallon, interview by Tony Middleton, both 1995, the Oral History of Jazz in Britain, British
Library Sound Archive.
These performances seem to have been very well received, and as in

1933 there was a sense among critics that the concert-style presentation
was more appropriate than a variety bill for an artist of Ellington’s stature:
When the Palladium moguls have finished with Duke, they will unquestionably
have knit his somewhat spreadeagled presentation into a slick West End show. That
will be fine and will, no doubt, please the general public – but we can’t help feeling
that it is not Duke Ellington. Perhaps on his concert tour, when he has the chance to
play the music associated with his genius rather than his music-publishing interests,
he will make the fans realise that this is indeed the one and only Duke who to them
is a legend and an idol.68
The 1948 visit represents a transitional phase in Ellington’s presentation

and reception in Britain. Unlike 1933, Ellington was no longer reliant on
the enthusiasm of fellow musicians (such as Hughes and Hylton) as the
tour was arranged under the auspices of the promoter Harold Fielding.
Compared with 1933, the balance between variety shows and concerts
had shifted in favor of the latter which were also more successful. This
may have been because there was greater awareness of the visit by the
time the provincial tour commenced, but may also be an indication that
Ellington himself – especially without the spectacle of his band – was no
longer as successful in variety entertainment but increasingly appealed to
a concert-going audience.69 However, the distinction was not absolute at
this stage. Although the writer of the Melody Maker editorial cited above
found Ray Nance’s “comedy dancing and over-vigorous singing” “almost
embarrassing” at the Palladium, Max Jones noticed that the same “vocal
antics and rebop dancing drew as big a hand as anything I heard” at the
concerts.70 Also, that “an appearance scheduled for Nottingham’s Albert
Hall was cancelled by its trustees, a church organisation, on the grounds
that jazz was not suitable for the institution,” indicates resistance to jazz
in some areas of British society and provides an interesting backdrop to
the British Sacred Concerts, discussed later in this chapter.71
The 1958 Tour
In 1956, the Musicians’ Union and the American Federation of Musi-

cians reached an agreement whereby there could be reciprocal exchange
68 “Editorial: Apprehension,” Melody Maker 26 June 1948, 4.

69 “Ellington Provincial Concert Triumphs,” Melody Maker, 10 July 1948, 1.
70 “Editorial: Apprehension,” 4; “Duke Ellington to Follow British Provincial Triumph with Dates
on the Continent,” Melody Maker, 17 July 1948, 1.
71 Strateman, Day, 292.
of bands between Britain and the US. The program for Ellington’s 1958
concerts acknowledged “Harry Francis, Assistant Secretary of the Musi-
cians’ Union, for his help in negotiating the Anglo-American exchange
details.”72 Francis recalled that while many British promoters were keen
to book American bands, few had the knowledge required to set up a tour
for a British band in America. The first Anglo-American exchange in 1956
brought Stan Kenton to England under the auspices of promoter Harold
Davison while Ted Heath performed in America.73 This arrangement set
a precedent for a large number of such exchanges prior to Ellington’s
return to the U.K. in 1958 – this time with his full orchestra, while Heath
again performed in New York. By the time of Ellington’s visit, so many
bands had taken advantage of the policy of reciprocity that Melody Maker
reported that there was even some danger that the market had become
over-saturated, with tickets for some American acts being slow to sell. This
precipitated some debate in the pages of the magazine on the reasons for
dwindling audiences, which identified poor value for money (short per-
formances for a high price); lack of publicity, especially in the provinces;
the timing of shows (which adhered to the decades-old model of two
performances each evening, the times of which did not seem to suit 1950s
lifestyles); and the tendency to present “a few musicians under a fancy
title” rather than an established group. By contrast, tickets for Ellington’s
opening concerts were reported to be selling well.74
Unlike in 1948, there was great anticipation of Ellington’s arrival and
subsequent coverage in the national press, but this attention consistently
referred back to 1933, with little or no mention of his intervening appear-
ance. In the weeks prior to his arrival, Melody Maker printed a “message
from Ellington” which referred to the inclusion of Harry Carney and
Johnny Hodges who were said to have also been on his “last tour of
the U.K.” Max Jones contributed a feature entitled “This World of Jazz.
The Duke – 25 Years After.” Jones mentioned hearing Ellington in 1933
and 1950 but not in 1948, although he had reported on performances
given in that year.75 Ellington’s visit was perceived to have great historical
72 Souvenir Programme: Norman Granz in Association with Harold Davison Presents Duke
Ellington and His Famous Orchestra in Concert (1958).
73 Harry Francis, “Jazz in Britain, 1924–1974: Reciprocal Arrangements,” http://jazzpro
.nationaljazzarchive.org.uk/Francis/As%20I%20heard%20it%20Part%205.htm (accessed 30
September 2014).
74 “Cool-Off Fans Puzzle Agents . . . but Ellington Tour Looks Good,” Melody Maker, 20
September 1958, 1.
75 Duke Ellington, “Frankly – This Is the Greatest!,” Melody Maker, 27 September 1958, 1; Max
Jones, “This World of Jazz: The Duke, 25 Years After,” Melody Maker, 4 October 1958, 11.
importance, as demonstrated by assertions from writers such as Steve

Voce that it was “the most outstanding event in our jazz history since
the war.”76 Personnel and repertoire were the principle subjects of these
preview articles. Having pointed out the inclusion of musicians who some
readers would have heard live in 1933, Ellington’s message stated explicitly
that, “As always, our main object will be to showcase the men in the band
as soloists.” Leonard Feather provided detailed introductions to the band’s
expected personnel.77 With regard to repertoire, in addition to “material
that goes way back,” Ellington promised numbers from his recent albums
Ellington at Newport (1956), Such Sweet Thunder (1957), and A Drum Is
a Woman (1956), and “Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald” (from Ella Fitzgerald
Sings the Duke Ellington Songbook [1957]) was later added to the list as a
nod to co-promoter Norman Granz.78
The Royal Festival Hall Concerts

Ellington began his October, 1958 tour with two concerts at London’s
Royal Festival Hall, a 2,900-seat concert hall which had been built for the
1951 Festival of Britain. Although he had already presented concerts in
Britain – and, in 1958, such concert presentations were actually performed
mainly in Gaumont and Odeon cinemas – his inclusion in a London venue
known primarily for classical music performances gave the impression of
completing his transition from the variety circuit into the realms of high
art in a British context. This narrative was anticipated by Feather who
noted that “the last time Duke Ellington brought his full band to Europe
the jazz world was incredibly different. It was 1933. Duke had never played
a concert. He had written only one arrangement (Creole Rhapsody) that
was more than three or four minutes long.” Feather’s commentary thus
fostered an expectation of serious concerts of Ellington’s extended works.79
However, as seen in several reviews, these latter hopes were confounded
in terms of both presentation and repertoire which, as in 1933, were
considered to be aimed at popular taste:
Those who went to hear “the first serious jazz composer” were no doubt startled
to be confronted with a sophisticated entertainer who treated his audience, his
orchestra and himself with an air of urbane frivolity.80
76 Steve Voce, “And All the Duke’s Men,” Jazz Journal, October 1958, 2.
77 Ellington, “Frankly,” 1; Leonard Feather, “Ellington: Meet the Band!,” Melody Maker, 4
October 1958, 2–3.
78 Ellington, “Frankly,” 1. 79 Feather, “Ellington,” 2–3.
80 Humphrey Lyttelton, “If They Criticize Duke I May Get Violent,” Melody Maker, 11 October
1958, 10.
Above all, the show was gay and lighthearted, with none of the atmosphere of
pious dedication to art that overcomes some jazz groups when they get into a concert
hall.81
The programme was surprising, consisting of medleys of Duke’s most popular
numbers of the past thirty years, with but the slightest reference to the more recent
orchestral suites.82
Specifically, criticism levelled against Ellington focused on his presentation

of “soloists – every man in the band had a considerable solo spot to
himself – rather than on the orchestra as a whole.”83 An influential factor
here was the inevitable comparison with Count Basie, who had visited
Britain twice in the twelve months prior to Ellington. This was exacerbated
by a Melody Maker feature, “This Week’s Great Jazz Controversy: Count
versus Duke,” in which leading jazz musicians were invited to indulge in a
“snap poll.” While Ellington was preferred for those who were interested in
soloists, Basie was appreciated for his ensemble work.84 For Vic Bellerby,
Ellington’s performances were too contrived: “Basie was quite confident
to let his band sit back, find the beat and play number after number,
improving all the time. Duke, the showman, played safely, far too safely –
thus giving jazz lovers a sad disappointment.”85 Humphrey Lyttelton, the
only musician in the poll who refused to side with either Ellington or Basie,
pointed out that “Duke doesn’t work like Basie. It’s only on rare occasions
that he rocks you in your seat with body blows from the full orchestra.”86
However, Ellington’s emphasis on soloists left his performances liable to
similar criticisms leveled at American importations which were perceived
as less coherent ensembles put together for commercial gain, such as
Norman Granz’s “Jazz from Carnegie Hall.”87 Under the heading “I Was
Disappointed,” Bellerby wrote:
The main trouble was that Duke, with typical modesty, wrongly demonstrated his
unrivalled solo strength by asking nearly every member of the band to take a solo
routine. And all the time we felt conscious of the hundreds of Ellington compositions
waiting to be played. The true secret of Ellington’s genius is his uncanny ability to
weave his soloists into an individual composition, continually absorbing our interest
by the ever-changing pattern and colour. We were not given one number in which
this happened.88
81 Philip Gaskell, “Ellington Returns,” Observer (London), 12 October 1958, 18.

82 Ibid. 83 Ibid.
84 “This Week’s Great Jazz Controversy: Count versus Duke,” Melody Maker, 11 October 1958, 1.
85 Vic Bellerby, “I Was Disappointed (Ellington Tour),” Melody Maker, 11 October 1958, 2.
86 Humphrey Lyttelton, “About Ellington,” Melody Maker, 25 October 1958, 10.
87 “Cool-Off Fans,” Melody Maker, 1. 88 Bellerby, “I Was Disappointed,” 2.
Despite such reservations, for some, the opening of the concert served
to reaffirm the transformative power of Ellington’s presence on audience
and musicians alike:
Ellington himself did not come on . . . [T]hey launched straight into their signature
tune, “Take the ‘A’ Train”. It was sad: no drive, no sparkle, no swing. Then, at the end
of the number, Duke Ellington walked lightly into the hall . . . We knew everything
was going to be alright now, and it was. The music suddenly bubbled and the
musicians – except for Hodges and Gonsalves who scowled throughout both sets –
managed to look as if they were enjoying themselves.89
More often, the democratic presentation of the individual members of the

band directly challenged the idea of Ellington as an autonomous, great
artist which had persisted in British commentary since 1933, as well as
upheld the value of his ensemble as a mere conduit for his individual
artistic expression, a view that was in accordance with a traditional view
of classical music practice. At the first mention of a possible visit in 1958,
Melody Maker’s readers were reminded that Ellington and his ensem-
ble had been voted top band, composer, and arranger in the magazine’s
most recent poll. Critics continued to struggle towards an appreciation
of Ellington, and were seemingly reluctant to depart entirely from the
notion that he was a conventional composer who wrote for “player, not
instrument”:90
Even inside the jazz world, the precise nature of Ellington’s method is woefully
misunderstood. He is neither the archetypal pianist-dance-band-leader who plugs
his own material, nor the ordinary kind of western composer. Ellington writes not
for woodwind, brass and rhythm, but for the individual members of his orchestra.91
No other writers go as far as Stanley Dance, whose essay in the tour

program suggests that by 1958 many of the band’s sidemen could be
accorded similar artistic status as their leader, thereby exposing a more
equal and collaborative quality in the ensemble’s creative work:
The band is a band of personality – and personalities. As a unit, it expresses Duke’s

personality. He plays piano in it, but essentially the orchestra is his instrument.
It interprets his ideas and compositions as no other ever could or can, but the
individuality of its components, the musicians within it, is never suppressed.92
89 Gaskell, “Ellington Returns,” 18.

90 H. J., “Score for Player, Not Instrument,” Manchester Guardian, 6 October 1958, 5.
91 “The Observer Profile: Duke Ellington,” Observer, 5 October 1958, 9.
92 Stanley Dance, “The Eloquence of Ellington,” in Souvenir Programme, 3.
It was perhaps hardly surprising that the British public did not fully appre-
ciate the subtlety of the relationship between Ellington and his musicians.
Sinclair Traill’s editorial in the October issue of Jazz Journal pointed out
the reliance of the British public on Ellington’s recorded output since his
previous visit. Traill’s commentary is reminiscent of the situation prior
to Ellington’s 1933 appearances: “We bought all his available records that
we hadn’t already got, imported others from America, and have been
collecting them ever since.” Ellington’s music was thought to be particu-
larly well suited to consumption in this way, as his was “one band whose
records, exhibiting an apparently inexhaustible range of tone colours, have
always managed to hold our interest and titillate our musical appetite.”93
Other writers expected that being able to hear Ellington’s band live would
improve his popularity: “It has been very noticeable recently – particularly
in the case of Count Basie – how much personal presence comes over at
a live performance, and consequently how much must be lost on wax.”94
It was also possible for adverse comparisons to be made with well-loved
recorded versions of Ellington repertoire: “[Sam Woodyard] and Paul
Gonsalves tried valiantly through 30 choruses to whip up the excitement
of the recorded ‘Diminuendo [and Crescendo in Blue]’ solo. But it is
asking too much to expect this to strike fire regularly.”95 Interestingly, in
an interview for Melody Maker, saxophonist Harry Carney indicated an
awareness of the dominance of recordings and their influence on audi-
ences: “‘Do you play the same choruses all the time, Harry?’ ‘Yes, I do.
Because when I saw Hawkins I wanted to hear exactly the same notes as
he did on the records. I wanted to see his movements, the expressions
on the face – everything. So I play the same choruses, too, in case there
may be a kid who might want it that way as well.’”96 That said, such
replication would not be expected by critics and audiences who upheld
spontaneity as a criterion for valuing jazz performances. For instance,
Dance encouraged Jazz Journal readers that “because Duke’s band is less
like a machine than most other big jazz groups, we suggest you catch it at as
many concerts as possible. Even in the very unlikely event of its playing the
same programme every night, there are sure to be substantially rewarding
93 Sinclair Traill, “Editorial: Duke’s Back,” Jazz Journal, October 1958, 1.

94 Dave Houlden and Frank Dutton, “The Duke Steps Out Once More,” Jazz Journal, November
1958, 7.
95 Max Jones, “A Knockout, of Course, but . . . ” Melody Maker, 11 October 1958, 13.
96 Maurice Burman, “Harry Carney Talks: All I Want Is to Stay with Duke,” Melody Maker, 11
October 1958, 2.
differences in performance.”97 Lyttelton assumed a more critical stance,

arguing that the myths surrounding legendary artists were exacerbated by
the
unnatural climate brought about by distance and the Musicians’ Union ban, when
our knowledge and judgement of musicians was based almost exclusively on gramo-
phone records. And we have seen over and over again how discrepancy between the
legend and reality has led to impaired judgement and bewilderment.98
Of course, the period 1933–48 encompassed the American recording ban

which restricted the flow of music still further.99
The Leeds Concerts

Ellington’s visit to Leeds is frequently noted by commentators, as it was
on this occasion that he was introduced to Queen Elizabeth II, a meet-
ing which inspired the subsequent composition of The Queen’s Suite.
However, the distinct changes in Ellington’s approach for the Leeds con-
certs – especially when compared with his opening concerts at the Royal
Festival Hall – have attracted less attention. Ellington’s booking for the
Leeds Festival appears to have been a key factor in the development of his
British tour, as this was reported as a possibility as early as February.100 In
1858, a music festival was staged in Leeds – a city in Yorkshire, north-east
England – to celebrate the opening of the town hall by Queen Victoria.
Thereafter, this event continued roughly triennially. The Festival usually
included only classical music, and featured new work from significant
living composers, including Arthur Sullivan, Antonı́n Dvořák, Edward
Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and William Wal-
ton. The Festival expanded in length and scope in the years leading up
to its centenary, and “by 1958 . . . had spread to even more venues, lasted
for a week and included other genres.”101 The Earl of Harewood took
over as president of the Festival in the centenary year, and his brother –
jazz enthusiast and writer Gerald Lascelles – undoubtedly influenced the
97 Stanley Dance, “Lightly and Politely,” Jazz Journal, October 1958, 25.
98 Lyttelton, “If They Criticize Duke,” 10.
99 A strike by members of the American Federation of Musicians against the record industry in
1942–4 meant that union musicians were prohibited from participating in recording sessions,
thus restricting the flow of records onto the market.
100 “Ellington Ork for Britain?,” Melody Maker, 15 February 1958, 1.
101 Richard Wilcocks, 150 Years of Singing: A Concise History of Leeds Festival Chorus [cover title:
A Brief History . . . ] (Leeds: Meerkat Publications, 2016; orig. pub. 2008); www
.leedsfestivalchorus.co.uk/history/ (accessed 14 January 2017).
introduction of jazz into the program. Described as “the most ambi-

tious week of jazz ever staged in a British city,” there were concerts by
Muddy Waters, Jimmy Rushing, and the British bands of Humphrey Lytt-
elton, John Dankworth and the Jazz Today Unit, in addition to Ellington’s
concerts.102
As in 1933, critics attempted to influence Ellington’s programming.
Traill travelled with Ellington on the train from London to Leeds and
tried to persuade him to dispense with what he perceived were the more
commercial elements of his previous performances:
We did try to impress upon him that in our opinion he could dispense with the drum
solo routine; plus other parts of his programme which had fallen uneasily upon ears
attuned to catch Ellington-sounds only. We were informed that the programming
for the vast audiences he plays for has been guided by experience. It is an effort to
try to please everybody. But, we insisted in our smoothest tones, could not the drum
solo be dropped at least from the Leeds shows? The drum routine stayed where it
always had been and received by far the greatest applause of the night! “Ah,” said
Duke, when we visited his dressing room after the show, “here’s my friend who
knows all about drum solos!”103
As this encounter demonstrates, Ellington was well aware of how to

approach playing at the festival. He wrote, albeit retrospectively, in Music
Is My Mistress: “Festivals of one kind or another had by now become the
springboard for new works, much in the same way as our annual Carnegie
Hall concerts had previously been. In 1958, I was invited to perform at
the first [sic] festival of the arts in Leeds, England, where I had the great
honor of being presented to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.”104 In addition
to retaining the drum feature, Hi Fi Fo Fum, at the start of the second half,
Ellington began his Leeds concerts with the same sequence of numbers as
at the Royal Festival Hall (Take the “A” Train, Black and Tan Fantasy, Creole
Love Call, The Mooche, and Newport Up). He then introduced “surprises”
by changing the features for individuals. For example, Jimmy Hamilton
was heard on My Funny Valentine instead of Tenderly, Clark Terry was
featured on Juniflip instead of Perdido, Cat Anderson on Caravan instead
of El Gato, and a particular high point, Johnny Hodges on Things Ain’t
What They Used to Be rather than Jeep’s Blues.105 Critics who had heard
several of Ellington’s performances on tour appreciated this variety. This
102 “Ellington to Meet the Queen,” Melody Maker, 18 October 1958, 1; “Queen to Hear Jazz at
Leeds,” Melody Maker, 11 October 1958, 9.
103 Sinclair Traill, “Editorial: Leeds, Music and Musicians,” Jazz Journal, November 1958, 1.
104 Ellington, Mistress, 196. 105 Lyttelton, “About Ellington,” 13.
approach also appeared to have the effect of rejuvenating the band, with
Max Jones reporting that “the orchestra was playing very keenly, with
more bite than I had heard at any concert except at the Kilburn State.”106
Most notably, Ellington also performed six pieces from Such Sweet Thun-
der prior to the interval, whereas previously only the “Sonnet to Hank
Cinq” had been included. Moreover, in the first Saturday concert at Leeds,
which was attended by Prince Philip, the “monologue” “Pretty and the
Wolf” was included. These works were notably associated with Ellington’s
appearances at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. Although
this might appear to be a direct response to the demands of British critics
for performances of demonstrably artistic works, it is entirely consistent
with Ellington’s more adventurous programming not only for concerts
and festivals, as indicated above, but also on his recent albums which, as
previously discussed, were largely responsible for setting British critical
expectations of his live performances.107
For Dance, these alterations to the program did not go far enough, but
he did not blame Ellington. Instead, this choice reflected the state of British
jazz audiences who continued to respond favorably to numbers which he
perceived not to be “most typical and worthy of Duke Ellington”:
A year or so ago we felt that a discerning jazz audience was in the process of creation
here. The undiscriminating reaction and applause to Duke’s programme painfully
indicated that this was not so. It is a shock to realise that, despite all the magazines,
books and records, the audience of 1958 knows far less about jazz and its verities
than that of 1933.108
Although Ellington employed some similar alterations in subsequent con-

certs in Croydon and at the final concerts of the tour in Kilburn, the open-
ing Festival Hall concert provided the blueprint for the majority of the
tour.109 As a result, far from the variation in Ellington’s performances that
Dance had anticipated, critics and Ellington fans who attended several
concerts were particularly disappointed by the (almost) “machine-like”
replication of the same program. This observation brought Jones full cir-
cle, in his summation of the tour, to the concerns about visiting American
106 Max Jones, “This World of Jazz Visits Leeds . . . and Leeds Takes Its Festival Calmly,” Melody
Maker, 18 October 1958, 13. Here Jones refers to the concerts at the Kilburn State, which
immediately proceeded Ellington’s first concert in Leeds. The band returned to Kilburn for
the final concerts of the tour.
107 Jones, “A Knockout,” 3; Jones, “This World of Jazz,” 13; and Traill, “Editorial: Leeds,” 1.
108 Stanley Dance, “Lightly and Politely,” Jazz Journal, November 1958, 27.
109 Vic Bellerby, “Jazz Fans ‘Bewildered,’” Melody Maker, 1 November 1958, 11.
performers which were being debated at the time of Ellington’s arrival, and
in particular the detrimental effect of what he perceived as the more-or-
less pre-formulated “jazz concert” on British audiences. Jones maintained
the view that in order to hear the Ellington orchestra at its best, it was
necessary “to go to a place where the band played for dancing.”110 How-
ever, Ellington’s Sacred Concerts offered a significant counterweight to this
view, and they also more generally challenged established ideas about the
most appropriate presentation of Ellington.
The Sacred Concerts
Ellington presented his First Sacred Concert in Coventry Cathedral and

at Great St. Mary’s, Cambridge, at the conclusion of his 1966 and 1967
British tours, respectively. According to an article in The Guardian news-
paper, Ellington was responsible for initiating the Coventry concert by
sending a tape of his sacred music to the provost of the Cathedral. Other
sources suggest that the approach came directly from ABC Television,
which broadcast to the Midlands and north of England at weekends until
1968.111 In any case, the concert was organized rapidly and announced
at short notice as an unplanned extension to the 1966 tour. Ellington
commented at the time: “I’ve been invited to do this programme in many
churches and I’m always honoured of course. When the chance came to
play at Coventry I was delighted. No, I’ve not seen the cathedral yet.”112
No doubt this comment might have caused a frisson for the majority of
readers who would be familiar with the uncompromisingly modernist
style of Britain’s newest cathedral. The church of St. Michael in Coventry,
West Midlands, was designated as a cathedral in 1918 but was destroyed
as a result of bombing in World War Two. A decision was taken to build a
new cathedral while leaving the ruins of the former building “as a mov-
ing reminder of the folly and waste of war.” The new cathedral, designed
by Basil Spence, was consecrated in May 1962, an occasion marked by
the premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem.113 Undoubtedly, the
interior of the cathedral provided a visually striking backdrop for Elling-
ton’s performance which was particularly important for the television
110 Max Jones, “Impact Could Have Been Stronger,” Melody Maker, 1 November 1958, 11.
111 “Cathedral Jazz Concert,” Guardian (London), 11 February 1966, 3; Geoffrey Beck, “In the
Cathedral” [letter], Observer (London), 13 March 1966, 31.
112 “Ellington Stays on for Coventry,” Melody Maker, 19 February 1966, 5.
113 “Our History: Coventry Cathedral,” www.coventrycathedral.org.uk/wpsite/our-history/
(accessed 14 January 2017).
broadcast. As Jones observed, “Just to see the Ellington band set up on the
Chancel steps, in front of the High Altar and Graham Sutherland’s Great
Tapestry [of Christ], was a memorable experience.”114 In the Coventry
concert, Ellington drew on numbers from his previous Sacred Concerts
with the addition of “Come Easter,” which was described as “a short-
ish and nicely grave band piece.” The concert culminated with “In the
Beginning God” (ITBG) before the band offered encores of “West Indian
Pancake” and “La Plus Belle Africaine.”115 The following year, Ellington
performed a U.K. Sacred Concert with a similar program in the more mod-
est and traditional surroundings of Great St. Mary’s, the university church
in Cambridge. Ellington’s high-profile 1973 European tour – which also
included a return to the Palladium for an appearance in the Royal Variety
Performance that was broadcast on national television – began with the
premiere of his Third Sacred Concert at Westminster Abbey. The Abbey
is located at the heart of the capital, next to the Houses of Parliament,
and has enjoyed particular association with British royalty as a free chapel
of the Sovereign and the coronation church since 1066. The concert was
organized by Gerald Lascelles, who had been so influential on Ellington’s
inclusion in the 1958 Leeds Festival and a figure who would undoubtedly
have been able to secure the venue through his royal connections. Lascelles
was also Chairman of the United Nations Association Concerts Commit-
tee and Ellington’s concert was given in celebration of United Nations
Day, which marks the signing of the UN charter on 24 October 1945. The
concert was attended by the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and the
Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret.
Critics identified some significant problems with the Sacred Concerts.
First, the musical material rarely escaped criticism:
ITBG a trifle too “bitty” for this reviewer, though, and contains several excruciating
moments, the classic low spot being sustained by the long-suffering Cliff Adams
Singers, refugees from the television commercial and Top-40 backing group, con-
scientiously chanting the names of the books of the Bible in ghastly mid-Atlantic
accents.116
The newer pieces seem to add little to what Ellington has previously done, and done
well.117
114 Max Jones, “Caught in the Act: Duke Swings in the Aisles,” Melody Maker, 26 February 1966,
23.
115 Ibid.
116 Valerie Wilmer, “Duke Ellington/London Philharmonic, Royal Albert Hall, London,” Down
Beat, 6 April 1967, 28.
117 Ronald Atkins, “Duke Ellington at Westminster Abbey,” Guardian (London), 25 October
1973, 14.
In addition, the acoustic properties of the surroundings contributed to a

less-than-perfect experience for the audience:
The occasion was momentous, the jazz superb, the acoustics, unfortunately, vile,
translating the impeccable precision of the Ellington brass into the shambling tones
of a third-rate pit orchestra.118
Hearing them, in a nave which is eighty feet high, eighty wide, and more than three
times that in length, was a more powerful experience, though acoustically the lofty
hall seemed far from perfect.119
Although I was sitting approximately thirty yards from the rostrum, much of the
proceedings were indistinct or inaudible to me . . . And when we can buy the record
and hear how it all actually sounded, I think it will be evident that the great man’s
visit to Westminster Abbey was time well spent.120
With such views in mind, it perhaps seems odd that reviewers were gener-
ally in agreement that the Ellington Sacred Concerts were successful. This
general assessment was both despite and because of the use of what a
photo-journalism piece in Jazz Monthly termed “improbable” venues for
Ellington performances.121 The concerts have to be put into the context
of earlier objections to jazz on moral grounds in Britain (sometimes actu-
ally advanced by members of the clergy), which would have precluded its
inclusion in religious buildings.122 Certainly, this history was not far from
the minds of the critics in attendance in 1966:
On Duke Ellington’s first British tour in 1933, such an occurrence would have been
unthinkable. Indeed, had the Duke band stolen into some holy place and played
Mood Indigo, there would certainly have been clerical dismissals, questions in the
House and thunderings in a Times leader.123
There was certainly no sense that either [the music] or its composer and his artists
being out of place in a cathedral.124
This underlying tension between genre and venue illuminates the signifi-
cance of the traditional-yet-modern Coventry Cathedral as the venue for
Ellington’s first British Sacred Concert. Indeed, the success of this con-
cert – where the presence of television cameras attracted more criticism
than the actual performances – must have encouraged the use of a more
traditional venue in Cambridge the following year (a location where jazz
118 Vic Bellerby, “Duke Ellington Coventry Cathedral,” Jazz Journal, April 1966, 4.
119 Jones, “Caught in the Act,” 23.
120 Les Tomkins, “Duke Ellington at the Abbey” [c. October 1973], in Vail, Diary, Part 1, 442.
121 David Redfern, “I.T.B.G. in the Cathedral,” Jazz Monthly, March 1966, 18.
122 Parsonage, “Evolution,” 22, 42, and 187–8.
123 Bellerby, “Duke Ellington Coventry Cathedral,” 4.
124 Dennis Barker, “Review: Ellington at Coventry,” Guardian (London), 22 February 1966, 6.
appreciation and performance was well established in the university com-

munity and likely to result in an enthusiastic audience).125 Reflecting on
the Cambridge concert in Down Beat, Valerie Wilmer commented on the
lack of tension between the traditional religious surroundings and mod-
ern jazz: “The hallowed portals of the 13th-century church didn’t daunt
the swingers as much as had the forbidding atmosphere of the Albert
Hall.”126
Ultimately, Ellington’s 1973 concert was presented in surroundings
which were not only traditional but steeped in significant British history:
“The Abbey is a deal more imposing than Coventry Cathedral, and more
oppressive, I would imagine, so far as jazz spirit is concerned.”127 The
largely positive reception of the two earliest British Sacred Concerts must
also be considered with reference to the tours of which they were the con-
cluding event. The Coventry performance took place at the end of Elling-
ton’s tour with Ella Fitzgerald, a billing which provoked debate in Melody
Maker’s letters pages before the performances had even commenced. A
letter from Vic Bellerby strongly rearticulates familiar arguments around
the commercial nature of vocal performances which he clearly distin-
guishes from the artistry of instrumental jazz, portraying the inclusion
of Fitzgerald as detrimental to the proper presentation of Ellington.128 By
contrast, tickets for the Coventry concert were free and thus appeared to
subvert commercial motives of promoters, although the reported “black
market” activity was perhaps inevitable.129
In 1967, the Cambridge concert was immediately preceded by a concert
in the Royal Albert Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO).
Despite decades of arguing for the presentation of Ellington as a serious
artist, the performances of works such as A Tone Parallel to Harlem in an
established concert hall by a renowned symphony orchestra were prob-
lematic for the critics. Both Wilmer for Down Beat and Ronald Atkins for
The Guardian felt that the orchestra added little to Ellington’s work, due
in part both to weaknesses they perceived in the extended compositions
which were performed and to the fact that they preferred the intimacy of
the Cambridge concert:
At the little university church of Great St. Mary, last month, [singer Esther Mar-
row] touched more hearts and moved more souls with a few magnificent bars of
125 Beck, “In the Cathedral,” 31; Parsonage, Evolution, 74–5.

126 Wilmer, “Duke Ellington/London Philharmonic,” 28.
127 Max Jones, “Duke at the Abbey,” Melody Maker, 3 November 1973, 14.
128 Vic Bellerby, “A Plot Against the Duke’s Fans?” [letter], Melody Maker, 15 January 1966, 16.
129 “Potpourri: Duke Ellington at Coventry,” Down Beat, 24 March 1966, 15.
Ellington’s Come Sunday than the combined forces of the composer, his orchestra,
and the London Philharmonic had succeeded in doing the previous evening when
they all but filled the vast arena of London’s acoustically antiquated Royal Albert
Hall.130
Neither event was outstanding, understandably enough, as Ellington was not on
home ground . . . The evening at Cambridge was more satisfying if not noticeably
uplifting . . . . As a warm and unpretentious religious spectacular it was very well
received.131
In a 1967 column in Jazz Journal, Bellerby was specific in linking presen-

tations of Ellington alongside both Fitzgerald and the LPO as unsuitable,
in his view forcing London audiences out to the provinces to hear a “band
concert.”132 In essence, critics objected to the performances with Fitzger-
ald and with the LPO as commercially contrived, whereas the Sacred
Concerts, despite the musical and acoustic problems, were appreciated as
a direct, albeit calculated, expression of Ellington’s persona:
The suite [sic] was Ellington at his most complex and perhaps self-conscious, but
certainly not least effective.133
But something was lacking. Could it be that in his aspirations toward the accep-
tance that is already his, Ellington’s pretentiousness has conquered his “soul”?134
In 1973, Jones could not disguise a similar yearning to Bellerby’s for the
Ellington of old, regretting that the Westminster event was “less of a
band concert, less of a swinging affair, than previous concerts had been.”
In Jones’s view, Ellington’s performances within a religious context had
always been received with minimal controversy in Britain, but latterly there
was generally a greater sense of acceptance and understanding.135 And,
according to Les Tomkins,
If anybody went to the Abbey thinking in terms of the Ellington band’s vast jazz
repertoire, they would have been dissatisfied. This had little to do with that. It
included jazz rhythms, it was motivated by that innate jazz feel, but essentially it
was Duke Ellington’s elaborate, eloquent hymn to his maker.136
Moreover, most reviewers of the Coventry and Cambridge concerts note

that the audience were given permission to applaud, indicating that Elling-
ton’s performances transcended the usual behaviors associated with such
130 Wilmer, “Duke Ellington/London Philharmonic,” 28.

131 Atkins, “Duke Ellington at Westminster Abbey,” 7.
132 Vic Bellerby, “Jazz in Britain: Duke Ellington,” Jazz Journal, March 1967, 26.
133 Barker, “Review,”6. 134 Wilmer, “Duke Ellington/London Philharmonic,” 28.
135 Jones, “Duke at the Abbey,” 14. 136 Tomkins, “Duke Ellington at the Abbey,” 442.
venues, but it was a wider sense of transcendence which dominated the

reception of the final British Sacred Concert.
In 1973, Ellington’s autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, was about to
be published, and although his lymphatic cancer was not yet public knowl-
edge, Ellington was noticeably weaker. In this context, it is perhaps not so
surprising that Derek Jewell’s extensive Melody Maker article previewing
the Westminster Abbey concert already sounds like a retrospective: “Any
Ellington performance these days is an event to be treasured, not missed,
since logic dictates that even the Iron Duke and his musicians will not
be able to go on indefinitely.”137 For an artist clearly in the final phase of
his career, if not his life, the expression of personal faith was appreciated
as more genuine than before, especially as Ellington repeatedly asserted
around this time that the Sacred Concerts were the most important things
he had ever done. Jewell understood the Sacred Concerts as one part of an
artistic persona which transcended boundaries between art and popular
genres, venues, and performance practices:
In Europe we tend to treat the Duke so seriously and so royally (as he truly deserves)
that we’ve perhaps lost sight of the whole aura of the man’s background. He plays
sacred concerts, yes; he plays seriously to serious people, yes; but he is also of
the world, and one facet of his multi-faceted music is about that too . . . He plays
cathedrals, concerts, casinos. He’s for fun as well as for fundamental.138
Despite his reservations about the concert performance itself, Ronald

Atkins appreciated the wider artistic importance of Ellington’s sacred
work, making an explicit reference to racial identity which was relatively
rare in post-1933 British writing on Ellington: “By remaining true to his
roots, by exploiting the gospel elements which make up a powerful strand
of the black American tradition, he has, however, produced a form that
can surmount the barrier relegating religious music to High Art.”139 For
Jones, too, the impact of the concert transcended cultural boundaries to
make a unique contribution to the wider history of Britain:
Westminster Abbey holds a unique historical place in the consciousness of most

English-speaking nations. Nothing like the sweet thunder of Duke’s concert of
sacred music had ever infiltrated its domes and pillars, tombs and pews, its choir
and nave before. And in all probability, nothing ever will again.140
137 Derek Jewell, “Iron Duke: Derek Jewell Welcomes DE to Britain for the Opening of His 1973
European Tour,” Melody Maker, 27 October 1973, 49.
138 Ibid. 139 Atkins, “Duke Ellington at Westminster Abbey,” 7.
140 Jones, “Duke at the Abbey,” 14.
Conclusion
In 1933, Ellington’s reception was governed by expectations associated

with variety theatre, radio broadcasting, dance engagements, and con-
certs. British critics upheld values associated with high art music as the
principal criteria for evaluating Ellington, and attempted to influence
both performers and audiences into conforming to conventions associ-
ated with concert presentations. Realization that these compromises were
unsuccessful for either side was fueled by the growing awareness of the
particular qualities of Ellington’s art, influenced by a developing under-
standing of the racial dimension of his work and jazz more widely. Elling-
ton’s 1948 performances have been neglected by commentators both then
and now. However, they represent an important phase in the transition
from variety theater to (provincial) concert halls, and notably advanced
the presentation of a combination of what would have previously been
classified as “art” and “popular” aspects of Ellington’s work. In retro-
spect, it is not surprising that following Ellington’s absence from the U.K.,
during which his ensemble work was represented exclusively through his
albums, concerts staged at the Royal Festival Hall in 1958 disappointed
the critics. However, his Leeds performances drew on a “festival” presen-
tation model which was new – and successful – in Britain, and which
again featured a balanced program. At the same time, the replication of
concert programs elsewhere on the tour meant that some critics contin-
ued to uphold dance engagements as the best way to experience Ellington,
now employing criteria more typically associated with jazz, such as variety
and spontaneity, in their judgments of his performances. This perception
was challenged by the Sacred Concerts, which presented Ellington in a
new situation where – unlike variety theaters, dance clubs, and concert
halls – there were no particular performance practices to which he would
be expected to conform.
Significantly, the Sacred Concerts prompted critical appreciation of the
unique qualities of the live event, complete with acoustic and even musical
imperfections, which could not be replicated by recordings – on which
British Ellington fans had been so reliant in the past. Ultimately, Elling-
ton’s sacred music could not be understood other than as a personal
expression. This view was commensurate with his status as an artist,
albeit in a rather romantic sense, especially given the retrospective tone
of contemporary commentary. The concerts were also perceived to be
largely transcendent of particular expectations concerning genre, venue,
and performance practices, and therefore could be more readily evaluated

on their own terms. However, this assessment of Ellington was not entirely
new, notwithstanding the numerous diversions along the way which have
been discussed across this chapter. In 1933, when Stanley Nelson posed the
question of whether Ellington’s music was “art or debauchery,” he iden-
tified its direct appeal to the senses, and the Liverpool Post and Mercury
commented: “When a man is taken up with equal enthusiasm by lovers of
jazz and the musical intelligentsia there is obviously something very spe-
cial about him.”141 Rather, it was the Sacred Concerts that finally provided
opportunities for the long-held desire of British critics to understand and
promote Ellington as an artist to be fully realized.
141 “Band of Memory Musicians,” Liverpool Post and Mercury, 28 June 1933, 7.
4 “Nobody Was Looking”: The Unparalleled Jazz
Piano Legacy of Duke Ellington
bill dobbins
On the evening of 23 November 1946, the Ellington orchestra played

its annual concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall, which had become a
tradition since the great success of its debut appearance on 23 January
1943. Ellington and his writing partner, Billy Strayhorn, always had a new
major work or suite ready to premiere at these special occasions, and the
fall 1946 program included the first New York performance of the Deep
South Suite. Although “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” was the only movement
from this work that the orchestra kept in its repertoire, Ellington’s solo
piano contribution, “Nobody Was Looking,” was a highly evocative and
musically significant piece in its own right. It is interesting to note that,
having not performed the piece publicly for more than fifteen years,
Ellington dusted it off for a rare solo concert at New York’s Museum
of Modern Art on 4 January 1962. In fact, the title of the piece is a
plausible answer to the question of why Ellington’s wide-ranging and, at
times, visionary work as a jazz pianist rarely achieved the recognition it
deserved. Throughout Ellington’s extraordinary career as the leader of
one of the most important orchestras in the history of jazz and one of the
most original and prolific composers in the history of Western music, his
unique contributions as a jazz pianist were easy to miss, especially when
that was not where the attention of the jazz audience was most keenly
focused.
In the later years when the orchestra played in nightclubs, Ellington had
a witty opening in which he would stride out to center stage as the band’s
theme song, Strayhorn’s Take the “A” Train, was coming to a close. After
greeting the audience in typically glowing Ellingtonian terms, he would
raise an arm toward the piano, palm turned upward, and announce, “And
now, ladies and gentlemen, we would like you to meet our piano player.”
As author and jazz critic Ralph Gleason suggested, the gesture and manner
were so convincing that at least a few Ellington novices over the years may
actually have seen a pianist at the instrument before the applause rose
and they got the joke. As effective as Ellington’s humor and showmanship
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“Nobody Was Looking” 109
were, however, he also said once, “There has never been a serious musician
who is as serious about his music as a serious jazz musician.”1
Ellington the composer and Ellington the pianist were both constantly
learning from everyone and everything, while always managing to utilize
all that was taken in from an unmistakably personal point of view, and
often in a more convincing manner than the sources from which such
appropriations came. In his ability to both consolidate and refine the music
of his time, Ellington resembles another of the most powerful of Western
composers and keyboardists, Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach voraciously
absorbed the forms and local idioms or mannerisms of the important
composers and regions of his day, but managed to utilize his sources and
inspirations in such an exceptional manner that his compositions are still
among the highest expressions of the broad language of chromatic tonal
music. Ellington’s mastery of the musical common practice of twentieth-
century America was equally impressive at a time when the language had
expanded to include many elements from African American folk music,
spirituals, the blues, ragtime, American popular song, and jazz.
To hear the Ellington orchestra in concert was to hear the entire history
of jazz to that point in time. Ellington’s piano playing similarly reflected
the history of jazz piano in a manner rarely equaled by pianists who were
more highly acclaimed. He incorporated elements of most influential jazz
styles or idioms in at least some of his music, and he anticipated more
modern elements than he is usually given credit for. Just as Ellington’s
music contained and reconciled seemingly contradictory elements – such
as sweet and pungent or sophisticated and primitive – it also contained
both the old and the new, and Ellington was never one to automatically
equate either modernity or tradition with musical quality or the lack of
it. This chapter explores this legacy through close studies of key examples
from Ellington’s recorded piano performances.
Ellington’s Early Pianistic Study and Development
As a child, one of Ellington’s first preoccupations was baseball; but after

he was hit on the head with a bat while playing with a friend, his mother
convinced him that he had to find a less hazardous passion. The switch to
1 Ralph J. Gleason, Celebrating the Duke, and Louis, Bessie, Billie, Bird, Carmen, Miles, Dizzy and
Other Heroes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), 159. In this quote, the first “serious” in the sentence
implies “classical.” In the 1930s, when this statement was made, serious music was understood
to mean classical music, implying that all other music was not really serious.
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piano lessons became permanent when, having participated in a number

of house parties, he noticed that “when you were playing piano there was
always a pretty girl standing down at the bass clef end of the piano.”2 Elling-
ton’s combination of the practical and creative aspects of life continued
throughout his career, whether coming from basic situational necessities,
personal experience, deadlines, or challenges of one sort or another. He
wrote his first piano piece while working as a soda jerk at Washington
D.C.’s Poodle Dog Café. As titles are often the final necessities for jazz
composers, he ended up naming the number Soda Fountain Rag.3
Many of the local pianists that Ellington listened to and learned from
while growing up in Washington – including Doc Perry, Louis Brown,
Louis Thomas, Claude Hopkins, and Les Dishman, among others – spe-
cialized in music from the ragtime repertoire and they typically developed
their own ways of playing the most popular numbers. It was through Doc
Perry’s tutelage that Ellington learned to read music. Perry never charged
a penny for their informal lessons and there was often food in the bargain
as well. Ellington said that most of the local pianists were eager to pass on
their tricks to younger enthusiasts; and if someone at an informal session
asked one of them what they had just done, the pianist would play the
passage again. There was also a good deal of musical exchange between
those who could read music and those who could not.
Another important figure during Ellington’s youth was his high school
music teacher, Henry Grant, who also gave private classical piano and
harmony lessons. Billy Taylor, an important jazz pianist who studied with
Grant during the 1930s, remembered that his lessons were sometimes
interrupted by a phone call to Grant from Ellington. Whether the caller was
just paying respects or getting another tip from his old friend and mentor,
in such instances the remainder of Taylor’s lesson would be about Duke
Ellington.4 While Ellington continued his harmony studies with Grant,
he was always paying attention to the musical influences that surrounded
him in everyday life. As he put it, “I could also hear people whistling, and
I got all the Negro music that way. You can’t learn that in any school.”5
2 Ellington, Mistress, 22. According to Ellington, the name of his first piano teacher was Mrs.
Clinkscales.
3 Although Ellington never made a commercial recording of Soda Fountain Rag in its entirety,
there is an incomplete version on the recording Duke Ellington, Live at the Whitney, Impulse
IMPD-173, 1972, LP. For more on this piece, see Tucker, Early, 33–41.
4 Billy Taylor. Telephone interview with the author, August 2007.
5 Ellington, Mistress, 33. For more on Ellington’s pianistic influences and experiences before his
move to New York, see Tucker, Early, and Cohen, America, 18–19.
After moving to New York in 1923, his informal type of studies continued,
this time with the composer, conductor, and violinist Will Marion Cook.
Ellington’s most extensive education in jazz piano, however, consisted
of the many jam sessions, known as “cutting contests,” that were a regular
part of the New York nightclub and “after hours” scene. All the finest
jazz pianists in New York frequented these sessions, including James P.
Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith, and Thomas “Fats” Waller. One of
the most well-known venues for these events was an establishment called
Mexico’s on 133rd Street in Harlem, which was run by George James, a
Harlem resident who was born in the South and had actually fought as a
mercenary in Mexico.
Johnson and The Lion befriended the young Ellington during his first
years in New York. Sonny Greer, the drummer in the Ellington orchestra
from its inception until 1950, introduced him to The Lion shortly after
Ellington’s arrival in New York. As for Johnson, Ellington had learned his
Carolina Shout from a piano roll before leaving Washington, D.C. Carolina
Shout was one of the contest pieces used at the late-night piano sessions,
and Johnson was impressed when Ellington sat right down at the piano
and played it for him at the occasion of their first meeting.
Once again combining the practical with the creative, Ellington’s strat-
egy at these “cutting contests” was to start them.6 After buying all the
participants a drink, he would perform first and then enjoy the inspira-
tion of hearing some of New York’s finest pianists trying to outplay one
another, without ever risking the unenviable position of being beaten to a
degree that might be humiliating. At the same time, he was cleverly taking
in a wealth of musical knowledge that he would make use of throughout
his career.
Refining His Craft and Finding His Voice
Ellington’s first important solo piano composition was Black Beauty,

which he recorded on 1 October 1928.7 The piece is also notable in that
it both received many reincarnations in arrangements for the Ellington
orchestra and remained in the group’s repertoire. Although the New York
6 Ellington relates this story in his own words in the film, A Duke Named Ellington, dir. Terry
Carter, Council for Positive Images, 2007, DVD (first aired on PBS on 18 July 1988).
7 Black Beauty was recorded earlier in 1928 in two versions by the Ellington orchestra, one for the
Brunswick label on 21 March (The Washingtonians, Black Beauty, Brunswick 4009, 78 rpm),
and the other for Victor on 26 March (Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Black Beauty, Victor
21580-A, 78 rpm). Interestingly, the piano version came after the orchestra version.
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Example 4.1 Black Beauty (1 October 1928), A theme, mm. 1–4, transcribed by Bill
Dobbins
pianists used formal designs in their compositions that were different

from the ragtime forms heard in the music of Jelly Roll Morton and other
New Orleans pianists, both schools of musicians were fond of pieces that
consisted of several contrasting thematic sections or strains.
After a 4-bar introduction, Black Beauty features a 32-bar AABA group-
ing of eight-bar phrases followed by a contrasting sixteen-bar C section
and 16-bar variation, and, finally, a variation of the opening AABA mate-
rial and a 2-bar coda. The introduction consists of dominant thirteenth
arpeggios that ascend in whole steps (E13–F13– G13) leaving the key of
the music in doubt. However, by proceeding through the circle of fourths
to C13 and F7+5 , Ellington establishes the key of B.
The A theme of Black Beauty (Example 4.1) makes very colorful use
of so-called “rootless” voicings, in which the notes being played imply
a chord root that is not actually present. The left-hand voicings in the
second and third measures could be analyzed as incomplete E and D
half-diminished chords, respectively. However, the sound of these voic-
ings strongly suggests an F7+5 chord followed by B9, both with no root.
Rootless voicings became much more common in jazz during the 1940s.
Pianists such as Bud Powell, Hank Jones, and Al Haig – who were among
the primary keyboard contributors in developing the bebop style of Char-
lie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie – preferred these kinds of voicings for their
transparent and open sonority; but many early jazz pianists, including
Ellington, were already using them. Half-step dissonances in the right
hand, as in the second measure of the A theme, were used by James P.
Johnson and others, often to intensify the bluesy quality in a melody.
While the first A section ends in a half cadence on an implied F9+5
chord, the second A section moves from a second inversion B triad in
measure 7 to E13 in measure 8. Moreover, the right-hand melody is an
abbreviated version of the E13 arpeggio heard in the very first measure
of the introduction. Here, however, this E13 chord is a passing harmony
to D7, the first chord of the B section. The 8-bar B section modulates to
the relative G minor in the first three measures, then quickly shifts to the
key of F and a common turnaround in that key: F–D7–Gm7–C7. The
third A section concludes on the tonic B triad, but in second inversion.
Ellington arrives at this chord through a return to the first three left-hand
voicings of the A theme, but the harmonic rhythm is now accelerated
to one beat for each chord (B/F–F9+5 – B9–F9+5 ), a simple yet highly
effective means of developing his material. The contrary motion in the
final measures between the melody (F– G–A–G–F) and the bass line
(F–E–D–E–F) is a masterstroke.
The most interesting thing about Black Beauty’s C theme is that, while
the first chord is F7, the music does not, in fact, remain in the key of
B-flat. Instead, the F7 chord is simply the first in a series of dominant
seventh chords, changing every two measures, that move through the
circle of fourths (F7– B7–E7). The 2-measure break in mm. 7–8 seems
to indicate that the E7 chord is the functional dominant, leading to A-flat
in m. 7. However, as this A-flat chord is a dominant ninth chord rather
than a simple triad, there is a hint of more harmonic motion to come. Here,
Ellington moves back and forth between A9 and C9, resisting a definite
commitment to any particular tonic. The A9 chord ultimately connects
back to F9 for the second 8-bar phrase, completing a pattern of descending
minor thirds (C–A–F). The second 8-bar phrase of the C section is nearly
identical to the first, but ends with chromatically descending dominant
chords (A9–G9–G9–F9), eventually setting up the return to the B-flat
tonic chord at the beginning of the closing variation of the AABA material.
In the two 8-bar C phrases, Ellington harmonizes his right-hand
melody with parallel first inversion triads, a basic harmonic texture that
he exploited throughout his career, finding musical contexts that always
seemed to yield fresh and surprising sonorities. In the C theme variation
here, he develops the sound of these parallel triads throughout the six-
teen measures. Ellington may have discovered such material in the playing
of Willie “The Lion” Smith, who used it quite effectively. Both Morning
Air and Sneakaway, from Smith’s 1939 Commodore recordings, contain
characteristic examples of his triadic melody harmonization.8
Ellington’s variation of the opening AAB material introduces fresh
colorations of the original harmonies, including a whole-tone scale flour-
ish in place of the blue-note dissonance in the second measure of the
8 Willie “The Lion” Smith, Morning Air, Commodore Mx B-531–2, 1939, 78 rpm, and
Sneakaway, Commodore Mx B-537–1, 1939, 78 rpm.
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A sections. Although the whole-tone scale was not an uncommon sound

in early jazz piano (particularly in the late 1920s), Ellington often used
it in ways that clearly informed the vocabulary of Thelonious Monk in
the years to come. Ellington sets up the B theme variation with a series
of chromatically descending dominant thirteenth chords, beginning with
B13 and played as staccato, even eighth notes. The shift from swing
eighths to even eighths creates a double-time feeling, as the staccato eighth
notes feel like quarter notes in the doubled tempo. These eighth notes
continue for the first two measures, decorating the D13 chord and its
dominant, A13, with half-step embellishments (E13–D13– B13–A13).
The dizzying chromaticism ends in two right-hand breaks on the Gm
tonic chord and Bm6, respectively, with the cascading descents returning
smoothly to the key of F and the original lilting swing tempo. The last four
measures of this variation are nearly identical to those of the original B
theme.
The broken tenths and octaves in the left hand, as heard in measures
5 through 8 of the B theme variation and elsewhere, provide rhythmic
interest and effective alternatives to the more common stride piano left-
hand pattern of alternating bass notes and mid-register chords played in
steady quarter notes. Actually, the common stride pattern is rarely heard
in many early jazz piano recordings, and Black Beauty is a typical example
of these. There were numerous approaches to stating and embellishing
the pulse in early jazz piano playing, and Ellington’s recordings from
the 1920s through the 1940s demonstrate that he was aware of them all,
incorporating whatever best suited the music at hand.
It is impressive to notice how Ellington makes subtle yet unmistak-
able connections between the different sections of Black Beauty by utiliz-
ing simple and easily identifiable material in different musical contexts,
sometimes disguising it through chromatic embellishment and rhythmic
augmentation or diminution, including the harmonic rhythm. For Elling-
ton, this was most likely the result of an extremely well-focused attention
or, as he liked to call it, “mental isolation,” rather than a premeditated or
academic process.
The musical vocabulary of Black Beauty is typical of the piano music of
James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Willie “The Lion” Smith. The infectious
lilt in the playing is reminiscent of Waller, whose earliest solo piano pieces,
such as Muscle Shoals Blues, were recorded in 1922.9 Still, Ellington’s piano
playing already exhibits signs of individuality, especially in the phrasing
9 Fats Waller, Muscle Shoals Blues, Okeh 4757-A, 1922, 78 rpm.

and pacing of the introduction, and in the tone quality and touch in the
more expressive moments. Of course, all of the more advanced harmonies
that early jazz pianists were using had been used at least a generation
earlier by European and American classical composers.
The point here is that music is like a language, and the most creative
musicians do not need to try to invent a new language in order to express
their individual take on things. In fact, Ellington could spice up a tradi-
tional jazz context with sounds that, in the hands of other pianists, might
seem no more than fashionable modernism in the cult of the bizarre,
appearing and vanishing as quickly as the fashions of the pop culture.
For Ellington, however, music had something to do with singing, danc-
ing, and praying (in some of his piano music after 1950, meditating also
comes to mind). An economy of means and imaginative development of
basic material gave his writing for his orchestra the same durable quali-
ties found in his piano playing: simplicity and directness that spoke to the
mainstream jazz audience combined with an effectively judicious infusion
of imaginative harmonies and unusual or angular melodies that intrigued
musicians and the more adventurous listeners. This is another example of
how Ellington combined seemingly contradictory elements in a manner
that showed them to be complementary and, ultimately, representing the
best of both worlds.
If, as many jazz masters have contended, the creative process moves
from imitation to assimilation to innovation, Ellington’s piano playing in
the late 1920s and early 1930s illustrates the degree to which he was already
assimilating the broad pianistic vocabulary that was the common parlance
of New York piano players. But even as early as 1930, he was also beginning
to make contributions as an innovator. For instance, the third measure
of Mood Indigo, which consists of nothing more than a simple minor
triad, is an example of pure genius, not by the material presented, but by
the context in which it is placed.10 After hearing a B-flat triad followed
by a C9 chord, the kind of F chord that is expected is some variety of
F7. When, however, a totally unadorned F minor triad appears, it is as
though we are hearing this familiar chord for the very first time, purely
and without the usual associations. To this day, few jazz musicians outside
of Ellington’s orchestra have played the opening phrase of Mood Indigo as
Ellington composed it, and to inadvertently omit that simple chord in an
unexpected place is to overlook the one thing that really makes the whole
phrase something unique. Mood Indigo will be revisited toward the end
10 The Jungle Band, Mood Indigo, Brunswick E34928-A, 1930, 78 rpm.

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of this chapter in relation to Ellington’s pianistic variations from different

recordings throughout his career.
The late 1920s and early 1930s found Ellington knee deep in compos-
ing and arranging for his orchestra’s nearly nonstop engagement at New
York’s Cotton Club, an extremely popular venue with the somewhat sur-
real arrangement in which an all-black roster of musicians and dancers
performed for an all-white clientele. In addition to the purely instrumen-
tal numbers that were floorshow and radio broadcast highlights for the
band or for customer dancing at the club, Ellington also had to compose
and arrange music (typically by the revue composers) for the floorshow
dancers, singers, and variety skits, thus leaving little time for practicing the
piano. Whether or not Ellington sensed during these years that recording
a definitive solo piano number was better done sooner than later, he came
up with a short but breathtaking tour de force called Lots o’ Fingers. Neatly
packaged in a medley that started and ended with the slow and plaintive
orchestra numbers East St. Louis Toodle-O and Black and Tan Fantasy,
Ellington recorded the piece on 9 February 1932.11 This performance
leaves no doubt that he could deliver the kind of knockout display piece
expected of all the great Harlem pianists. The blistering tempo is, on aver-
age, about 300 quarter notes per minute. The key centers of the thematic
sections in Lots o’ Fingers move through the circle of fourths from C to F,
B-flat, E-flat, and A-flat. Later extended works such as Diminuendo and
Crescendo in Blue (1937) and Blue Belles of Harlem (1943) used a similar
key scheme to at least some extent.12
Of course, Ellington’s piano playing was informed by many sources
other than his keyboard peers and elders. In the January 1931 Brunswick
recording of his two-part orchestra composition, Creole Rhapsody, part
two begins with an extended solo piano interlude. The interlude ends with
a 12-bar blues solo in E-flat, coincidentally the same key as Louis Arm-
strong’s famous West End Blues, recorded in 1928.13 Ellington’s phrasing
and melodic content shows some influence not only from Earl Hines,
11 Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, East St. Louis Toodle-O – Lots o’ Fingers – Black and Tan
Fantasy, Victor 71836–2, 1932, 78 rpm.
12 Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Diminuendo in Blue, Brunswick M648–1, 1937, 78
rpm, Crescendo in Blue, Brunswick M649–1, 1937, 78 rpm, and Duke Ellington and His
Orchestra, “Blue Belles of Harlem,” The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts: January 1943,
Prestige 34004, 1977, LP set.
13 The Jungle Band, Creole Rhapsody, Parts 1 and 2, Brunswick E35939-A and Brunswick
E35940-A, 1931, 78 rpm; Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, West End Blues, Okeh 8597, 1928,
78 rpm; Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Creole Rhapsody, Part 1 and 2, Victor 68231–2 and
Victor 68233–3, 1931, 78 rpm.
who was the pianist on West End Blues, but also from Armstrong’s lines.
Nearly five months later the Ellington orchestra recorded a completely
different version of Creole Rhapsody for the Victor label. The comparison
of content, development, and form in the two versions makes for a fas-
cinating study in itself.14 Of particular interest in the second version is
Barney Bigard’s rubato statement of the main theme toward the end of
part two, with Ellington’s accompaniment displaying an exemplary bal-
ance of spontaneous creativity and solid support. There are many brilliant
jazz piano soloists who are not particularly good accompanists, and vice
versa. Ellington was exceptional in both roles. He could vary the manner
and content of his accompaniment to suit a particular soloist; and he had
the rare ability to drop in a minimal response to a phrase of the orchestra,
or one of its horn sections, which framed it perfectly.
A typical example in Ellington’s early piano playing of finding a new
wrinkle in a familiar situation can be heard in the introduction to Uptown
Downbeat, recorded on 29 July 1936.15 In response to the ensemble’s
opening figure, Ellington puts the ninth, C, on the bottom of his widely
spaced B-flat minor voicings (a situation where someone like Count Basie
would have used the more consonant B). This creates a prickly dissonance
that he resolves to B at the end of the phrase. There are many jazz theory
and arranging texts that discourage students from using exposed minor
ninth intervals because they are “too dissonant.” Ellington, however, was
already using them convincingly in the early 1930s. For him, there was
only one simple rule for making music: “If it sounds good, it’s good music,
and if it doesn’t, then it is the other kind.”16
Piano in the Background: The Middle Years
The late 1930s and early 1940s were watershed years for Ellington the
composer, and there are moments in many of the recordings from this
period where Ellington the pianist shines through as well. These middle-
period pianistic displays begin with Ellington’s Diminuendo and Crescendo
in Blue, recorded on 20 September 1937. The first and second parts of this
remarkable virtuoso ensemble showcase are connected by an exotic piano
solo with rhythm section accompaniment. Formally, the solo consists of
a chorus of blues in D-flat with the last two measures repeated as a tag.
14 There is an insightful comparison in Howland, Uptown, 167–71.

15 Duke Ellington Orchestra, Uptown Downbeat, Brunswick B19628–1, 1936, 78 rpm.
16 Ellington, Mistress, 455.
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Although the half-step/whole-step diminished scale had certainly been

used in classical music before 1937, this is certainly one of its earliest
appearances in jazz.17
In this solo, Ellington selects a minimal amount of content and develops
it in a straightforward and convincing manner. He begins with right-hand
voicings just above the treble clef that contain the raised ninth of the D7
chord (enharmonically the minor third) on top and the seventh and third
below. The left hand takes on the melodic function with a descending
line in the middle of the treble clef that repeats the lowered ninth, root,
and seventh (D, D, and C), concluding on the fifth (A). This material
is played once more to complete the first four measures of the blues
form. All the notes in these measures belong to the D half-step/whole-
step diminished scale (D–D–E–F–G–A– B–C–D). In the next four
measures, Ellington moves this material a perfect fifth lower to G7, then
a perfect fourth lower, back to D7. In the last four measures of the chorus
he continues down another perfect fourth to A7 and, finally, a perfect
fifth lower to D7. As the last two measures of the chorus are played two
more times as a tag, a gradual ritardando leads to a final sustained D7+9
chord.18
Ellington’s gradual descent from medium-high to medium-low register
provides a brief recap of the overall shape of the “diminuendo” half of
the composition. His emphasis on the raised ninth or blue third makes
a subtle connection to the “crescendo” half that follows. In this second
part of the number, the unison clarinets begin by repeating a short motive
that moves from the root to the blue third in the new key of E-flat. While
the piano truly shines at the close of the first movement of the piece, it is
completely absent in the second.
In recording studio practice of this era, especially before the develop-
ment of long-playing records, piano solos longer than twelve measures
were a rare exception for Ellington. A choice example of his piano mak-
ing the most of a few notes is found in his completion of the recurring
17 The general term “diminished scale” refers to either mode, alternating whole step and half step
or vice versa, and stems from the fact that the scale contains two fully diminished seventh
chords a half-step apart, thereby dividing the octave into four equal parts. Perhaps due to the
fact that it contains eight tones rather than the customary seven of Western tonal music,
classical music theorists commonly refer to it as the octatonic scale, even though it is not the
only eight-tone scale to be found in musical common practice.
18 This piano solo was later extended further, and a long “wailing interlude” featuring the
hard-driving tenor saxophone of Paul Gonsalves was added in the mid-1950s. Although these
extended versions of the piece were often exciting, they tend to obscure the many interesting
connections between the two parts of Ellington’s composition.
Example 4.2 In a Mellotone (4 May 1940), introduction, mm. 1–3, transcribed by Bill
Dobbins
unison-saxophone refrain in the 1940 Jack the Bear.19 This recording

features the extraordinary bassist Jimmy Blanton, and was named for a
Harlem bassist that Ellington knew. Here, following the opening thematic
sections, the saxophones play a 4-bar unison line that introduces a con-
trasting theme. Ellington continues the concluding E of the saxophones
with a dissonant major second interval, D–E, and then resolves the ten-
sion by further contrary motion to the major third, D–F. It is difficult to
imagine a pair of dyads creating a more striking musical effect.
A piano texture used by Ellington in the introduction to In a Mellotone,
recorded just two months after Jack the Bear, employs right-hand octaves
with another chord tone in between and three-note rootless voicings in the
left hand (Example 4.2).20 By doubling only the melody, these six-note
voicings deliver an extremely rich sonority. In this case the harmonies
are simply parallel dominant ninth chords, but the same texture can be
employed with any type of harmony.
Although Ellington certainly did not invent these harmonic structures,
the manner in which he used them had a major impact on many younger
pianists. Billy Taylor has said that figuring out the voicings from Ellington’s
introduction to In a Mellotone inspired him to develop his own compre-
hensive block-chord approach.21 Apparently Taylor was not alone, as this
texture became a stock-in-trade used by nearly every important jazz pianist
since (including, for example, such influential artists as Ahmad Jamal and
Red Garland). Arrangers have also incorporated piano solo material of this
kind into big band arrangements. A particularly impressive example of
this approach can be heard in Gil Evans’s orchestral adaptation of Ahmad
19 Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Jack the Bear, Victor 044888–1, 1940, 78 rpm.
20 Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, In a Mellotone, Victor 053428–1, 1940, 78 rpm.
21 Taylor interview.
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Jamal’s “New Rhumba,” as heard on the 1958 Miles Davis recording, Miles
Ahead.22
An important case in which Ellington’s mid-career music clearly antic-
ipated later developments in jazz is that of bebop, in general, and Thelo-
nious Monk in particular. Ellington’s Cottontail, written in 1940 to feature
tenor saxophonist Ben Webster and the saxophone section of the Elling-
ton orchestra, already embodies the most essential qualities of bebop. The
main theme – loosely based on the harmonic progression of the George
Gershwin song, “I Got Rhythm” – could be mistaken for a Dizzy Gillespie
line, except for the fact that Gillespie’s influential compositions (which
helped launch the new music) did not begin to appear until several years
later.
In terms of piano playing, it is clear that Ellington was a primary
influence on Monk. For instance, Ellington’s playing on Black Beauty and
Uptown Downbeat illustrates the use of minor ninth dissonances and the
whole-tone scale, two sounds that occupied a prominent place in Monk’s
vocabulary. Further evidence of this influence can be heard in Ellington’s
1940 recordings, Jack the Bear, Ko-Ko, Cottontail, Sepia Panorama, and
I Never Felt This Way Before.23 In fact, Cottontail and Sepia Panorama
contain the same three-note voicing heard in the introduction to Uptown
Downbeat, but Ellington uses it differently in relation to the specific context
of each piece. In the hands of a master pianist or composer, even an
unusual voicing can suggest a wide variety of different meanings and be
developed in different ways depending on the details and mood of the
musical situation.
Ellington recorded a group of duo numbers with his bassist Jimmy
Blanton on 1 October 1940. In one of these pieces, Ellington’s Mr. J. B.
Blues, the connection with Monk is undeniable.24 The piece begins with
two 8-bar phrases in G consisting of solo bass responses to a brief bluesy
piano figure. This opening section is followed by two choruses of blues
in G, the first of which starts with a 4-bar piano sendoff. In Ellington’s
accompaniment to Blanton’s second chorus, he uses voicings that are
22 Evans based the arrangement on a 1955 trio version by Jamal. Miles Davis, Miles Ahead,
Columbia CL1041, 1958, LP.
23 Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Ko-Ko, Victor 04889–2, Cottontail, Victor
049655–1, Sepia Panorama, Victor 054625–1, I Never Felt This Way Before, Victor 053581–1, all
1940, 78 rpm.
24 Duke Ellington and Jimmy Blanton, Mr. J. B. Blues, Victor 053507–1, 1940, 78 rpm. Monk’s
comping on “Hackensack” (from Monk with Sonny Rollins and Frank Foster, Prestige LP 7053,
1982, LP) and “Bye Ya” (from Monk’s Dream, Columbia CL 1965, 1963, LP) includes widely
spaced sixth chord voicings like those used by Ellington in Mr. J. B. Blues.
Example 4.3 Mr. J. B. Blues (1 October 1940), second blues chorus, mm. 5–8,
transcribed by Bill Dobbins
characteristic of Monk’s comping. For example, instead of voicing the

notes of the G6 chord relatively close together, as was more common, he
uses an extremely wide spacing in which the top note in the right hand
is the sixth (E), and the fifth (D) is placed a major ninth below. Even
with the third (B) in between, the dissonance of the major ninth interval
imparts an unusual sonority to this otherwise conventional harmony.
When the harmony changes to C9 in m. 5, Ellington puts the root (C) in
a register in which it creates another major ninth interval with the ninth
of the chord (D) in the right hand (Example 4.3). Due to the change
in harmony, the placement of the third and ninth, just as in Uptown
Downbeat, is the opposite of the usual one. Moreover, the two adjacent
major ninth intervals (E–D and D–C, in descending order), give the C9
chord a much higher degree of dissonance, which is resolved somewhat
when the harmony changes back to G6 in m. 7. In terms of rhythm,
Ellington bases his accompaniment for the entire chorus on one of the
most typical two-note rhythms in jazz: the main rhythm of the much
earlier James P. Johnson standard, Charleston.
It is easy to find passages in jazz theory and harmony texts from the last
fifty years that refer to sixth chords as “old fashioned” harmonies that were
avoided by “modern” jazz musicians. The example above clearly shows
that it is the manner in which a chord is used rather than the chord’s type
that determines the degree of harmonic interest. As the old song from the
Swing era says, “‘Tain’t What You Do, It’s the Way That You Do It.”25
Following a modulation to the key of D and a 12-bar blues chorus by
Blanton, Ellington develops his own solo chorus from a pair of dyads
that, together, make up a close voicing of a dominant thirteenth chord.
25 This song was written by Sy Oliver and Trummy Young, and was first recorded in 1939 by both
Jimmie Lunceford and Ella Fitzgerald.
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The opening D13 is split into the major seventh interval, C–B, and the
minor sixth interval, F–D. Ellington follows this with an E13 in which
the original order of the intervals is reversed to minor sixth (G–E) and
major seventh (D–C). In the second bar of the chorus, the second chord
is changed from a chromatic upper neighbor to a chromatic lower neigh-
bor (C13) before returning to D13 (and an enthusiastic response from
Blanton’s bass). Ellington develops the remainder of the chorus simply by
decorating the basic harmonies of the blues form with the same material:
G13–G13–A13–C13–D13 in measures 5–8 of the chorus, followed by
A13– B13–B13–E13–D13 in measures 9–12. These phrases begin with
dominant thirteenth chords based on IV and V, respectively. However,
measures 9–12 end with E13–D13, in contrast to the opening phrase of
the chorus (E13–D13–C13–D13).
Such symmetrical use of chromatic parallel harmonies that are colored
by some dissonance can be clearly heard in some of Monk’s themes, such
as Epistrophy.26 The content of Ellington’s chorus in Mr. J. B. Blues could
easily have come from Monk, except that Monk’s earliest recordings as a
sideman did not appear until 1944; and it was the late 1940s and early 1950s
before Monk’s fully mature conception was documented on record. While
on tour with his orchestra in England in 1948, Ray Nance played Ellington
some of Monk’s first recordings on a portable phonograph Nance had just
bought. After listening for a while, Ellington commented, “Sounds like
he’s stealing some of my stuff.” It was obvious to Nance that Ellington
clearly understood what Monk was doing.27
Yet another masterpiece from 1940, Warm Valley, recorded only a couple
of weeks after the duets with Blanton, is as beautiful a feature for the sensu-
ous alto saxophone of Johnny Hodges as Ellington ever wrote.28 However,
Ellington’s 4-bar unaccompanied introduction immediately captures the
listener’s attention. In establishing the key of B, Ellington begins on an E-
flat minor triad with a major seventh followed by an E diminished seventh
chord, both over a B pedal tone. The voice leading is especially ingenious,
with the right-hand melody moving in contrary motion (D–D) to the
left hand’s minor thirds (E–G, E–G). In the final measure, the pedal
tone descends from B to A, implying a rootless F13 chord with a lowered
ninth. The right-hand melody emphasizes large leaps that are resolved
stepwise, a common characteristic of Ellington’s and Strayhorn’s ballad
26 Thelonious Monk, Genius of Modern Music, vol. 1, Blue Note 5002, 1951, 10-inch LP.
27 Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 107.
28 Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Warm Valley, Victor 053430–1, 1940, 78 rpm.
Example 4.4 Blue Serge (15 February 1941), last four measures of Ellington’s solo,
melodies that was already evident in the A phrase of Black Beauty. Here
again, Ellington achieves rich musical content with a minimum number
of notes.
A striking example of Ellington’s use of blue notes in a completely
different context from Mr. J. B. Blues is the haunting ballad, Blue Serge,
written for the Ellington orchestra by his son, Mercer.29 Along with fine
melodic interpretation from trumpeter Ray Nance and saxophonist Ben
Webster, as well as an outstanding improvisation from Webster, there is
another Ellington piano gem to be enjoyed here. In just a 2-bar pick-up
and an 8-bar solo, Ellington gracefully balances on the high wire between
the relaxed walking ballad tempo and a double-time feel, right up to the
perfectly placed somber harmonies of the solo’s final cadence (Example
4.4). While the basic chords in this cadence are not unusual (D7–9 , D9,
and Cm11), the G in the melody above the D9 chord creates a strong
disturbance with the F, a minor ninth below, before the stepwise resolution
in the final measure of the solo. However, as the G is a blue note in the key
of C minor, the ear readily accepts its melodic validity. In fact, it perfectly
complements the gloomy mood of the piece.
Still more tasty tidbits of Ellington piano can be heard on the 1941
recordings, Just A-Settin’ and A-Rockin’, Clementine, and I Don’t Know
What Kind of Blues I Got, as well as the 1942 recordings, Perdido, The “C”
Jam Blues, I Don’t Mind, and Sherman Shuffle.30 The “C” Jam Blues pro-
vides an extended view of Ellington the accompanist in a basic blues for-
mat, while the piano introduction to Sherman Shuffle features descending
29 Although the noun “serge” refers to a fine cloth, in his notes to Duke Ellington: The Blanton
Webster Band (Bluebird RCA 5659–2-RB35, 1986, compact disc boxed set), Mark Tucker
speculates that the title may also refer to Serge Rachmaninoff.
30 All of these releases can be found on the Duke Ellington: The Blanton Webster Band boxed set.
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Example 4.5 Solitude (14 May 1941, take 2), first chorus, last A section, mm. 1–4,
chromatic lines between the major sevenths and sixths of the descending
harmonies in a manner frequently used by bebop pianists in the generation
to come.
A rare Ellington solo recording from this period, a 1941 version of his
popular song hit, Solitude, illustrates his ability to freshen up familiar
material through reharmonization.31 The clever 6-bar introduction starts
with a beautifully creative decoration of a B-flat minor chord, with the
left hand shifting back and forth between the seventh and sixth, implying
rootless voicings of Bm7 to E9.32 In m. 5, Ellington continues in the
circle of fourths to a suspended A dominant, voiced as Em7 over A.
Before resolving the suspension, however, he intensifies the dissonance by
playing the upper notes of an altered E7 harmony above the A bass note,
with the strong tension of the G resolving by half step to the seventh of
A9+5 . The same suspended A7 voicing is used in the fifth measure of
the first two A sections, creating a subtle harmonic link. In the first two
A sections, Ellington uses ascending passing chords, C diminished and
major triads with their thirds in the bass, to get from the opening D-flat
tonic chord to the F minor chord in the second measure. The harmony
then moves through the circle of fourths to B-flat minor and Em7. Before
the arrival of the suspended A7 chord in bar 5 of the A sections, Ellington
interpolates the dark sounding C ninth chord with a raised eleventh.
Also of note is the last A section of the first chorus, where Ellington uses
substitute harmonies in the first two measures of the section (Example
4.5). Following the D-flat major seventh chord (with the third in the
31 Duke Ellington, Solitude, Victor 065605–2, 1941, 78 rpm.

32 Ellington came upon a variation of this vamp during his 1962 recording session with John
Coltrane, as can be heard in the introduction to “In a Sentimental Mood” on Duke Ellington
and John Coltrane (Impulse! 8045, 1963, LP). As Coltrane chose the key of D-flat rather than
the original key of F, the A section starts in B-flat minor.
bass), he uses secondary dominant chords, C7 and F7–9 , to lead to the B-

flat minor chord at the end of bar 2 of the section. By extending the B-flat
minor harmony with the chromatic line on the bottom of the left hand
(B–A–A), he avoids the E-flat minor chord altogether, while the implied
E9 chord at the end of bar 4 of the section sounds much brighter than
the expected C ninth chord heard earlier. Furthermore, in bar 4 of the
final A section, Ellington returns to the very same left-hand voicings used
in the introduction. Such ingenious and compelling musical storytelling
is as typical of Ellington’s piano playing as of his composing.
Piano in the Foreground: The Carnegie Hall Concerts
Between 1943 and 1948, due largely to the annual Carnegie Hall concerts
by the orchestra, Ellington’s piano playing began to be showcased in a
more prominent manner. The first of these, on 23 January 1943, saw
the New York premiere of Ellington’s monumental tribute to the history
of the American Negro, Black, Brown and Beige. Although this more
than 40-minute orchestral work offered some noteworthy passages for
Ellington’s piano, it was Blue Belles of Harlem that featured him to fullest
advantage.33
Blue Belles of Harlem was originally written for a 1938 concert of Paul
Whiteman’s orchestra for which he had commissioned five American
composers to write pieces that would in some way suggest the tones of
bells. Like most of Ellington’s extended compositions, as distinguished
from the later suites, Blue Belles of Harlem has a freewheeling, rhapsodic
character in which several themes are introduced, varied, and sometimes
combined in imaginative ways.
The piece opens with two clarinets repeating an upper register minor
third interval, G–B, with bell-like articulation in a moderately slow,
ceremonial rhythm. As the full ensemble develops this material, the lower
tone moves from G to G and back, lending a blues coloration that justifies
the increasingly dissonant harmonies. This development leads to the main
theme of the piece, which is stated by Ellington’s unaccompanied piano.
Here Ellington combines an extremely active and subtly agitated melodic
line with rootless voicings consisting simply of chromatically ascending
tritone intervals. It is difficult to miss the fact that the first three notes of
the A theme (the fifth, sixth and seventh degrees of the tonic major scale)
33 Ellington, Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts: January 1943.

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Example 4.6 Blue Belles of Harlem (23 January 1943), Ellington’s “bent note” effect,
are exactly the same as the opening of Solitude, from 1934, even including
the repetition of the third note. This is a revelatory example of how a
great composer can begin with exactly the same material, yet proceed in
completely different but equally convincing directions.
A little over four minutes into this five-and-a-half-minute work, Elling-
ton emphatically uses a special piano technique that can be heard fre-
quently in later recordings of Monk.34 By sharply accenting the half step
dyad, C–D, and then releasing the D while holding the C, Ellington
creates the illusion of a so-called “bent note” on the piano (Example 4.6).
The effect occurs again in the parallel phrase two measures later, and lends
a strong blues feeling to this section.
Some of the piano textures and thematic material of Blue Belles of
Harlem are closely related to the major Ellington work introduced at the
Carnegie Hall concert of the following season. This latter composition is a
kind of miniature concerto or rhapsody for Ellington’s piano and orchestra
entitled New World A-Comin’.35 Inspired by the book of the same name by
Roi Ottley, which looked toward a social revolution that would improve
the prospects of African Americans, New World A-Comin’ represents a
different kind of extended composition from the more ambitious, multi-
movement Black, Brown and Beige. Ellington uses a single movement
as in Blue Belles of Harlem, but the thematic material here is developed
much more extensively and in a more disciplined manner. The result is a
13-minute dialog between Ellington’s orchestra and his piano playing.
The orchestra begins the work with a statement of the main theme
section, the first eight measures of which emphasize a melodic motive
built on the third, fourth, and fifth scale degrees in the key of C, with
34 Listen to the second chorus of Monk’s solo on “I Mean You” on Thelonious Monk, Big Band
and Quartet in Concert, Columbia, CL2164, 1964, LP.
35 Duke Ellington, Live at Carnegie Hall December 11, 1943, Storyville 1038341, 2001, compact
disc boxed set.
each statement of these notes returning to the opening note, E. This

passage is backed by a series of reharmonizations. The next eight bars
begin with an exact chromatic transposition of this melodic cell from
E–F–G to G–A–B, with the lowered sixth and seventh scale degrees
accommodating further harmonic variation. The tessitura of the thematic
material gradually ascends toward the end of this section, leading to the
first piano entrance.
Ellington’s piano continues the development of the opening motive,
moving it further up to the seventh, root, and ninth of the C major chord
(B–C–D). The D9 chord in the second bar of this passage moves abruptly
back to the C chord, but in bar 4 the implied rootless F9 chord that
follows the D9 adds a blues color before the return to C. At the end of
bar 5, Ellington inverts the opening interval of the ascending half step
(B–C) and the resulting pair of notes (B–A) are reharmonized several
times, continuing the development of this material. While the rhythm of
the opening motive suggests the spoken words of the title, the descending
half-step motive suggests a variant of the opening four notes of Mood
Indigo.36
The descending half step is then transposed, reharmonized, and
extended to three-note groups (A–B–A–C, A–B–A–G), temporarily
leading to the key of A. Ellington’s harmonic progression that leads back
to the opening key of C and the next ensemble section is ingenious and
dramatically effective: AMaj7/E – E7+9 – AMaj7/E – E9sus – F7/E – Dm7
–DMaj7 – G7–9 . Moreover, the right hand gradually ascends from A to
C above the chromatically descending bass line (E–E–D–D), before the
final descending half step from C to B, the third of G7.
The main motive of the B theme, following a passage for the saxophones
that reworks some of the solo piano’s freely stated opening, is related to the
solo piano’s descending half-step variant (B–A–B–A). The new theme,
stated in an assertive medium swing tempo, begins with an ascending F
minor triad framing an octave C before its descent to C (B–A becomes
C–C, or B). Moreover, the descending half step now has a strong blues
flavor, created by the fifth and lowered fifth in F minor. Although the
harmonic motion between tonic and dominant in the first eight measures
of this passage is quite basic, Ellington uses four completely different
C7 sonorities. The most surprising of these is in the second bar where
36 For a more detailed formal analysis of the composition see David Schiff, “Symphonic
Ellington? Rehearing New World A-Comin’,” The Musical Quarterly 96 (Fall–Winter 2013):
459–77, and Howland, Uptown, 266–80.
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Example 4.7 New World A-Comin’ (11 December 1943), C theme, mm. 1–4,
the melody note, C, creates an unusual C7 with an enharmonic major

seventh on top. Because of the resolution back to C in the third bar,
the ear accepts the C as a blue note, even though it is clearly outside
the chord. Such extreme non-harmonic tones also exist in classical tonal
music, normally occurring as accented chromatic neighbor tones, passing
tones, or appoggiaturas.
The C section, which occurs only once in the piece, provides effective
contrast with a bright tempo and a bluesy melody harmonized in parallel
thirds, supported by a jaunty left-hand ostinato. The ostinato is related to
boogie-woogie and rhythm-and-blues styles, and foreshadows the osti-
natos of Keith Jarrett’s solo concerts and related phenomena in the solo
jazz piano world of the late 1960s and after.37 The main melodic motive
emphasizes the same three notes as the opening motive of the piece, E–
F–G, but here these pitches are in the second voice, with the upper notes,
G–A–B, adding a blues color (Example 4.7). In the third and seventh
measures the G in the lower voice is altered to G, intensifying the blues
color in combination with the B above.
Although harmonies associated with European impressionism can be
heard in Ellington’s music from the late 1920s, their presence is quite
prominent throughout New World A-Comin’. From the 1940s onwards,
this vocabulary plays an increasingly significant role in Ellington’s musical
palette, sometimes providing an effective contrast to the blues elements
and sometimes blending with them to create strikingly personal combi-
nations. Ellington’s trio sessions for the Capitol label in the early 1950s
are among the more convincing and well-known manifestations of such
cross-fertilization.38
37 For example, listen to Jarrett’s performance of the short encore at the end of side three of Keith
Jarrett, Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne, ECM 1035–37, 1973, LP set.
38 Duke Ellington, Piano Reflections, Capitol M-11058, 1972, LP.
As with Blue Belles of Harlem, Ellington never made a definitive studio

recording of New World A-Comin’ in its original form for his orchestra. He
did smooth out some minor rough edges in the interpretation, however,
and the 1945 radio broadcast from the Duke Ellington Treasury Shows
is, overall, a tighter and more convincing performance.39 The piece was
resurrected in a version for the Ellington orchestra and the Symphony of
the Air Orchestra in 1955, with a performance at Carnegie Hall on 16
March. As amazing as Ellington’s musicians were in broadening the tonal
palette of possibilities in relation to the instruments normally found in a
jazz orchestra, the content and musical character of New World A-Comin’
clearly benefited from the additional colors of orchestral woodwinds,
French horns, and strings, and the solo piano part also improved with
Ellington’s editing through the intervening years.40
The 19 December 1944 Carnegie Hall concert included the premiere of
Ellington and Strayhorn’s Perfume Suite. The third movement, Ellington’s
“Dancers In Love,” is a charming and sometimes humorous piano fea-
ture with the alternate title, “Stomp for Beginners.”41 The multi-themed
formal structure hearkens back to the Harlem piano repertoire of Elling-
ton’s youth. The most remarkable element in the piece is the ingenious
melody of the A theme. It consists of a sequence of chromatically descend-
ing perfect fourth intervals. Although the perfect fourths are descending
chromatically, Ellington begins with the lower note so that the broken-
fourth interval itself goes up. Further, by switching the direction of every
fourth pair of notes from ascending (C–F) to descending (D–A), Ellington
creates even more interest in what, otherwise, would be a fairly predictable
pattern. At the beginning of “Dancers,” this melody is accompanied by a
simple harmonic turnaround in the key of F with one chord per measure:
F/A–G7–G7–F. At the end of the piece, however, Ellington extends the
original 4-bar phrase to seven bars. Beginning with the pickup note to the
downbeat of the fourth measure of the section, the broken fourth intervals
ascend chromatically, still with every fourth pair of notes changing from
ascending (C–F) to descending (G–D) (Example 4.8). However, the bass
39 The Treasury Shows consisted of live weekly radio broadcasts from April to November of 1945,
and April to October of 1946. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, The Treasury Shows, vol. 6,
Storyville 9039006, compact disc boxed set.
40 The 1970 album, Duke Ellington: Orchestral Works, features Ellington as soloist with the
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Erich Kunzel. This release notably
offers a very convincing performance of the symphonic reworking of New World A-Comin’.
Duke Ellington, Orchestral Works, MCA MCAD-42318, 1989, compact disc (orig. 1979, LP).
41 Duke Ellington, The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, December 1944, Prestige P-24073,
1977, LP set.
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Example 4.8 “Dancers in Love” (from the Perfume Suite, 19 December 1944), final A
phrase, mm. 1–4, transcribed by Bill Dobbins
line begins on the third of the tonic chord and descends chromatically to
the third one octave lower, and then leaps down to the tonic note for the
final tonic chord. “Dancers In Love” remained in the Ellington repertoire
and never failed to engage and delight audiences.
Between the Carnegie Hall concerts of December 1944 and November
1946, there are a few studio recordings from the years 1945 and 1946 in
which Ellington’s piano playing is exceptionally creative. The 11 May 1945
version of Caravan has some of the most imaginative comping to be heard
during this period from any pianist.42 In the 16-bar orchestral A sections
that alternate long stretches of dense C7 and other altered dominant chords
with resolutions to F minor, Ellington is using the highest and lowest Cs
together as a percussion effect and persistently nudging at the G below
middle C. In the 16-bar B section, which moves through dominant seventh
chords in the circle of fourths (F7–B7–E7) to a cadence in the relative
key of A-flat, he interjects flashes of perfect fourth chord arpeggios that
contain relevant chord tones. Ellington cuts the orchestra’s last A section
down to eight measures, percussively emphasizing the D below middle
C in the C7 measures and C in the F minor measures. The next phrase
suddenly returns to the 16-bar B section, where Ellington jabs at the
flatted fifths of the dominant seventh chords in the medium low register.
The coup de grâce, however, is saved for the end of the piece. Above a
simple F minor triad in the upper bass clef register Ellington hammers
out chime-like fourth chords with notes beginning in the middle of the
treble clef (B–E–A–D). No other jazz orchestra could have recorded
such a mysterious sounding piece in 1945, and no other pianist could have
painted such a stunning accompaniment with so few notes.
42 Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Caravan, Victor D5VB262–1, 1945, 78 rpm.
Another exceptional display of Ellington’s masterful skills as accompa-

nist can be heard in the version of Transblucency that was recorded on 9
July 1946.43 This is certainly one of Ellington’s most poignant and original
series of variations based on the 12-bar blues form. In a cut-down and
more transparent instrumentation, the combination of Kay Davis’s beau-
tifully controlled wordless vocal with Lawrence Brown’s trombone and
Jimmy Hamilton’s clarinet is totally captivating, with the lines sometimes
crossing to a point at which they blend into a single entity that is clearly
much more than the sum of its parts. Ellington’s piano is the thread that
holds everything together, sometimes subtly implying a double-time feel-
ing, often seamlessly connecting one section of the piece with the next and
guiding the ensemble in and out of rubato interludes to re-establish the
tempo. There are few pianists who could have convincingly performed the
piano’s role in this piece, and Ellington makes it all sound so effortless.
Returning to the subsequent Carnegie Hall concerts, the 23 November
1946 program included the Deep South Suite, whose third movement,
“Nobody Was Looking,” was devoted solely to Ellington’s piano playing.44
The piece is a miniature tone poem, and reveals the degree of synthesis
he had already achieved of the myriad elements of stride piano, blues,
American popular song, and the chromatic harmony and dissonance of
early twentieth-century classical music. According to Ellington, the music
recalls the trials of a playful puppy attempting to make contact with a pretty
little flower. Every time he reaches out, a breeze comes along and blows
the flower away. Ellington points out that there is no antagonism between
the puppy and the breeze; each is simply following its natural tendencies.
The title of the piece refers to an observation that, for Ellington, had
a significant connection to the story: “when nobody is looking, many
people of different extractions are able to get along well together.”45 It also
illustrates his ability to address America’s racial issues in an imaginative,
winning manner, without being preachy or confrontational.
After a 12-bar introduction, the piece displays a rondo-like design:
ABACA. It is the A sections which convey the storyline in musical terms,
while the B and C sections provide suitable contrasting themes. Elling-
ton’s manner of playing in the A sections is masterful in communicating
the innocent enthusiasm of the puppy as it darts after the flower. The
43 Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige, RCA Bluebird 6641–2-RB, 1988, compact disc boxed
set.
44 Duke Ellington, Carnegie Hall, November 23, 1946, Queen Disc 018, 1976, LP.
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Example 4.9 “Nobody Was Looking” (from the Deep South Suite, 23 November 1946),
A theme, mm. 13–16, transcribed by Bill Dobbins
ritardando to ad libitum tempo, combined with the somber C7 chord

with a lowered fifth and a descending melodic phrase with prominent
blue notes perfectly depict the puppy’s disappointment as the breeze sud-
denly whisks the flower away. The series of ascending seventh chords,
leading through the keys of C, E-flat, G-flat, and A before drifting grad-
ually back to C, suggests the flower becoming momentarily airborne and
then floating safely back to earth (Example 4.9).
The B section, in the key of G, sounds as if the puppy is trying to
figure out just what is going on, and demonstrates Ellington’s deft use of
non-harmonic tones in the relationship between right and left hands. In
bar 7 of the section, the blue note (F) is harmonized with a B-flat minor
triad, creating a dissonance with the bass note (D). The resolution to an A
minor triad implies an incomplete D9 chord. When the left hand affirms
this on beat four, however, the melody note (D) is harmonized with a
G triad, anticipating where the harmony is heading while clashing with
the left hand. The right hand’s dyad at the end of this measure confirms
the D7 chord while reiterating the blue note (B) that recurs throughout
the measure. Finally, the G7 chord in the next measure moves on to C7,
appropriate to the bluesy character of much of the piece. Instead of a fully
resolved C7 chord, however, Ellington puts a stubbornly non-harmonic
tone (F) squarely in the melody, delaying the final resolution until the
end of the sixteenth-note line in the following measure. The chromatic
sequence of fourth intervals that lead to the descending G diminished
seventh arpeggio and the concluding phrase of the B section add an
appropriately humorous touch to this lighthearted musical tale.
The final movement of the Deep South Suite, “Happy Go Lucky Local”
also included strong doses of Ellington’s piano playing. It was one of
many Ellington compositions inspired by trains and train travel.46 The
46 For Ellington’s complete description of “Happy-Go-Lucky Local,” see ibid., 184–5.

Example 4.10 “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” (from the Deep South Suite, 23 November
1946), first piano solo, mm. 1–4, transcribed by Bill Dobbins
piece begins with the horn sections sounding the train’s whistle, and then
opens with two 12-bar choruses of spirited A-flat blues in a powerful
medium swing tempo. The first chorus features 2-bar exchanges of triplet
eighth-note lines between Ellington and bassist Oscar Pettiford. This is
followed by Ellington’s own blues chorus, superbly crafted around his own
insistent train whistle of dissonant cluster harmonies that imply a double-
time feeling (Example 4.10). The clusters contain the basic A7 chord
tones, but add the notes in between for percussive effect. In the second
4-bar phrase, the rapid descending cascades of whole-tone scales are like
bursts of steam, followed by broken chords in left-hand eighth notes as
the contented train moves patiently down the tracks. A variation of the
opening cluster chords is heard in the final two measures of the chorus,
completing a highly adventurous yet thematically concise solo statement.
Variants of the same material can be heard in Ellington’s solos from the
numerous radio broadcasts and studio recordings of “Happy-Go-Lucky
Local,” leaving no doubt about the significant contribution of “the piano
player.”47
The 27 December 1947 Carnegie Hall concert included the premiere of
one of Ellington’s most original piano pieces, The Clothed Woman.48 It is
also one of the most stunning instances of his ability to effectively com-
bine aesthetic opposites. Within a four-and-a-half-minute span, Ellington
anticipates the abstract piano sounds of Cecil Taylor, pays homage to Willie
“The Lion” Smith, takes an improvised solo that foreshadows so-called
modal jazz, and ends up back in the world of abstraction, albeit with a
47 The fact that “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” was premiered six years before the release of
Thelonious Monk’s Little Rootie Tootie, whose train-whistle clusters are remarkably similar to
Ellington’s in both register and texture further indicates the probability of Ellington’s
influence.
48 Duke Ellington, The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concerts, December 1947, Prestige P-24075,
1977, LP set.
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clear hint that he understands the basic principles that connect the most
important European and American music of the last three centuries.
Following a brief introduction by the orchestra and the exclamation
point of Harry Carney’s baritone saxophone, Ellington sets up the A sec-
tion with a dissonant upper register dyad and a descending arpeggio that
lands on the lowest G octave. All of this material from the E diminished
scale (E–F–G–A–B–C–D–E) leads to the lowest F octave. Although
the A section of The Clothed Woman has been described as atonal,49 it is
actually a cleverly disguised blues in F, and a basic blues at that.
For most ears, the “clothing” Ellington selected for this particular lady
has covered the subject exceedingly well. Upon arriving in the tonal area
of F, the first four measures of the A section emphasize an F triad, an
incomplete C13+11 chord (only the third is missing), another F triad
and, in the fourth measure, an F7–5 chord. Just as in a basic blues, this
leads to B7 in bar 5. It is the grace notes and “shadow” harmonies that
most effectively obscure the otherwise basic content. The grace notes that
encircle the third of the F triad in the first measure of this section are rather
basic chord tones, except for the B, which creates some tonal ambiguity.
In the second bar the notes of the grace-note chord in the right hand are a
whole step above those of the half note, and are in a higher octave, but it is
still the B that most strongly obscures the connection to C7. In the third
bar, the right hand quintuplet on beat two is simply an embellishment of
the F chord by its dominant, C7, with a lowered fifth. The melody then
resolves back to the seventh and fifth of F7, descending stepwise to the
third on the downbeat of the fourth measure. Here the grace-note cluster
implies a half step decoration of F7 with the root, third, and ninth of a
G-flat chord. The F7 sound is embellished with an incomplete descending
C whole-tone scale, implying F7 to C7 and back to F7, as in the previous
measure. In the fifth bar, the B7 chord is decorated with the E and B
grace notes. These are simply altered chord tones, but the close voicing
and low register add a definite degree of abstraction. In the second B7
measure, the lower register E triad resolves like a leading tone back to F in
the next measure, exactly as in a basic blues. Here the grace-note chords
combine the sixth of the E chord with an F triad, to which the harmony is
returning.
Ellington’s use of a special pedaling technique, in which the damper
pedal is pressed just in time to catch the ring of the grace-note chords,
49 See Gunther Schuller, “Duke Ellington,” in The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, vol. 2
(E–K) (London: Macmillan, 1986), 39.
Example 4.11 The Clothed Woman (27 December 1947), A section, mm. 1–4,
blends the sound with the primary chords that follow. This creates a
pianistic approximation of the “wa-wa” effect of brass instruments played
with the plunger. Just as with Ellington’s bent-note effects in Blue Belles of
Harlem, he creates the illusion of something that is technically impossible,
proving to be as much of an alchemist at the piano as he was with his
orchestra.
In bars 9 and 10 of the A section, the harmonies include G7 to C7
and B6 to C7, abstracted in a similar fashion, and a final return to the F
triad in measure 11 of the section. Instead of using the usual 12-bar form,
however, Ellington recaps the first four measures of the A section to make
fourteen measures. The final F7–5 chord leads to a bop-like interlude in
B-flat, the key of the more substantial B section, which evokes the spirit
of The Lion.
The melody of the B section to The Clothed Woman is mostly penta-
tonic, and the blue note (D) in the final cadence of the 8-bar principal
theme adds an appropriate hue to its musical personality. The left-hand
accompaniment here is built on staccato quarter notes, creating a jazz
march feeling. Below the repeated third interval of B and D, a chromatic
line moves from the major seventh to the fifth of the B-flat chord and
back, in a 2-bar vamp. The entire B section follows an AABA form in
8-bar phrases, with the march feeling throughout.50
The B section is followed by a return to the short melodic figure that
introduced it, but now over a left-hand vamp consisting of alternating
second inversion B-flat triads and E half-diminished chords (two quarter
notes of each). This vamp implies the sound of a decorated C9 chord, and
50 The Lion used a similar accompaniment in the middle section of his solo piano piece, Morning
Air, recorded in 1939.
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the string-bass line (whether by Oscar Pettiford or Junior Raglin) centers

around C as well.51 Since Ellington’s entire solo is based on this static
harmony rather than on a sequence of chords, it deserves to be consid-
ered as an early forerunner of modal jazz improvisation. (Unfortunately,
Ellington decided not to stretch out in the studio version of The Clothed
Woman.52 )
The Clothed Woman was recorded before the earliest modal efforts
of George Russell, a decade before both the modal Miles Davis and Gil
Evans collaborations and the jagged expressionistic work of Cecil Taylor’s
first recordings (from 1956). That some critics and listeners considered
Ellington old-fashioned by the end of the 1940s may be due to the fact
that by the time a new trend had been around long enough for critics to
notice it, Ellington had already extracted what suited his purposes and
moved on. Moreover, he had an extraordinary ability to incorporate fresh
sounds into his music in such an organic manner that it never stood out as
unnatural, unless it was clearly intended for either comic or melodramatic
effect.
Although the last of the annual Carnegie Hall concerts on 13 November
1948 offered no piano work of special significance, the 1940s clearly saw
Ellington’s unique pianistic abilities receiving broader public exposure.
The duet recordings with the virtuoso bassist Jimmy Blanton and the
important solo features in several of the Carnegie Hall performances put
anyone who was paying attention on notice that Ellington could bring
something out of the piano that was just as personal and captivating as
the musical tapestries he devised for his orchestra.
Ellington’s piano playing on recordings with his orchestra between
the mid-1930s and late 1940s must have attracted the attention of the
young Gil Evans. The biting major second dissonance and its resolution
in response to the saxophones’ recurrent unison phrase in Jack the Bear,
the percussive jabs and whole-tone scale flourishes in Ko-Ko, the ground-
breaking blues voicings throughout “Happy-Go-Lucky Local” and the
single note lines suggesting dialog rather than comping behind a soloist are
only a few of the sources that clearly informed the manner in which Evans
played piano in his own orchestra beginning in the late 1950s. The playing
on his arrangement of Chant of the Weed and the originals La Nevada
and Las Vegas Tango, offer numerous striking examples of Ellington’s
51 Ellington had two bassists in the orchestra for this concert, and he wrote a new piece to feature
them, Basso Profundo. Unfortunately, the liner notes to commercial releases of the concert fail
to mention which bassist played which piece in the rest of the program.
52 Duke Ellington, The World of Duke Ellington, vol. 2, Columbia PG33341, 1975, LP set.
influence.53 However, while Ellington rarely wrote down even a single

note for the piano in any of his scores, varying much of this material
from one performance to the next, Evans meticulously notated nearly
everything the piano was to play, including most of his solo passages.54
The First Trio Sessions and the Capitol and Columbia Years
In 1950 Ellington composed what is often considered to be his most con-

vincing extended composition, Harlem (a.k.a. A Tone Parallel to Harlem
and Harlem Suite), which was recorded by the orchestra on 7 December. In
sharp contrast to the Deep South Suite, which featured generous portions
of Ellington’s piano, Harlem excluded the piano altogether. Perhaps it was
the extensive focus on composing this major work for the orchestra alone
(sans piano) that suggested, as a kind of aesthetic equipoise, a need to
develop an appropriate recording showcase for his piano playing.
Unfortunately for Ellington, the competition from early rock ’n’ roll,
rhythm and blues, and a greater demand for small groups, made the
early 1950s a difficult time to keep the orchestra working. When Ellington
signed with Capitol Records in 1953, he did his best to make some hit
recordings that might lead to greater visibility and attractive offers for
performing. Although none of this materialized to the degree that he
might have hoped, the new Capitol contract did result in the release of
his first major collection of trio performances. The 1953 album, Piano
Reflections, with its combination of Ellington hits and new compositions,
contains some of his finest piano work. While “Who Knows?,” “Janet,” and
the cryptically titled “B Sharp Blues” show that Ellington was well aware of
bebop developments, several of the other compositions on the album make
use of harmonies associated with the French impressionist composers
(e.g., Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel).55 “Retrospection,” “Melancholia,”
and “Reflections in D” are, in this regard, unique in jazz piano offerings
53 “Chant of the Weed,” from Gil Evans, Great Jazz Standards, World Pacific WP 1270, 1959, LP;
“La Nevada,” from Gil Evans, Out of the Cool, Impulse A4, 1960, LP; “Las Vegas Tango,” from
Gil Evans, The Individualism of Gil Evans, Verve V6–8555, 1964, LP.
54 The careful reconstruction of nearly all of Gil Evans’s music by Ryan Truesdell confirmed this
during visits to the Eastman School of Music throughout the 2010–11 school year in which
much of this music was performed by student ensembles. (Truesdell discovered many
previously unrecorded pieces, and was given access to the scores of the commercially released
music by Evans’s widow, Anita.) The scores of much of Ellington’s work can be perused at the
Duke Ellington Collection.
55 As Strayhorn’s fondness for the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel was well known,
it is possible that much of Ellington’s exposure to their music came indirectly through
Strayhorn’s piano playing and his musical contributions to the Ellington orchestra. For
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of the period.56 While the specific influence of Debussy and Ravel on

Strayhorn’s work has been clearly documented by Walter van de Leur,
there has been no definitive evidence as to exactly how these harmonic
leanings affected Ellington.57
The A section of “Retrospection” begins with arpeggios and broken
chords in double notes that outline major seventh chords in minor third
relations: D, A, and B. Finally, a succession of descending major thirds
leads to an F major chord, which completes the sequence in thirds. The B
section is developed above a chromatically descending harmonic progres-
sion: Bm7, B7+5 , D/A, Gm7–5 , A7/G, D/F, Fdim7, and Em7. The first
six chords of this progression seem to foreshadow such Strayhorn works
as “Star-Crossed Lovers,” from Such Sweet Thunder (1957) and “Haupé,”
from the film score to Anatomy of a Murder (1959).58
Following a brief introduction of quiet bell tones with a marked pen-
tatonic emphasis, the A section of “Reflections in D” uses chromatic
harmonic decoration of a gradually descending D scale, emphasizing the
triads of G minor, F minor, F-sharp minor, D-sharp minor, E minor,
and finally, C-sharp to D, all above a D pedal tone (Example 4.12). A
brief move from F7 to B minor soon returns to D and a colorful use of
the minor second interval, C–D, as a double melodic pedal tone in the
last two measures, above the basic diatonic harmonies of D, E minor, D,
and A7.
In the second A section, Ellington extends the opening material, begin-
ning this extension with a colorful C13+11 chord. The new material is
clearly an organic continuation of the A section rather than a contrasting
theme. This extended A section is repeated with some variation before
returning to the shorter opening A section and a brief coda, which returns
to the quiet bell tones of the opening sonorities.
“Melancholia” begins with diatonic cluster voicings that gradually
broaden below a D pedal tone in the piano’s middle register. The A
insightful commentary and analysis in relation to Strayhorn’s music, see Van de Leur,
Something, 50–1, 58–9.
56 Bud Powell’s “Dusk at Sandi,” from The Genius of Bud Powell (Norgran MGN 1063, 1956, LP),
may well have been influenced by Ellington’s use of impressionistic harmony throughout the
1940s.
57 See Van de Leur, Something.
58 Such Sweet Thunder, also referred to as the Shakespearean Suite, was recorded between August
1956 and May1957, while the score for Anatomy of a Murder was recorded in May and June of
1959. Duke Ellington, Such Sweet Thunder, Columbia 65568, 1999, compact disc (orig. 1957,
LP), and Anatomy of a Murder, Legacy/Sony BMG 65569, 2008, compact disc (orig. 1959, LP).
Whether Ellington influenced Strayhorn or whether he was influenced by earlier Strayhorn
arrangements is impossible to determine, but the connections in Retrospection are clear enough.
Example 4.12 “Reflections in D” (14 April 1953), first A section, mm. 1–3, transcribed
by Bill Dobbins
sections make imaginative use of dominant seventh chords with raised

ninths. These function as secondary dominants in the key of D-flat. The
use of Gm6 above an A bass note as a substitute for a more conven-
tional A7 is particularly attractive in the cadence to the DMaj7 tonic
chord. In the B section, Ellington begins with ascending diatonic seventh
chords: DMaj7, Em7, and Fm7. These lead to a dramatic arrival on
Gm7, which Ellington underscores by a sudden shift from an increas-
ingly loud dynamic on the first three chords to a very quiet one on the
minor subdominant. In most tonal music, the minor subdominant tends
either to proceed to the dominant or simply resolve back to the tonic
chord, so Ellington’s shift from Gm7 to GMaj7 is a real surprise. These
ascending diatonic seventh chords are reminiscent of the rubato phrases
in the opening section of “Nobody Was Looking” from the Deep South
Suite (see Example 4.9 above), but achieve a remarkably different result
here.
“Retrospection,” “Reflections in D,” and “Melancholia” are all rubato
mood pieces, and Ellington’s touch, phrasing, and sense of dynamics are
extremely effective in communicating the subtle nuances that so clearly
differentiate the specifically intended mood of each. During his final two
decades, Ellington returned from time to time to a musical vocabulary
similar to the one used so skillfully in these relatively brief musical self-
portraits.
Of the three pieces recorded at the second session for Piano Reflections,
“Kinda Dukish” is arguably the most important. In 1956, it was attached
as an extended introduction to the rip-roaring arrangement of one of
Ellington’s most popular instrumental hits, Rockin’ in Rhythm, and was
a major piano feature for Ellington in his final two decades. The main
theme is based on a variation of the “I Got Rhythm” chord progression in
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Example 4.13 “Kinda Dukish” (3 December 1953), 32 measures before the closing
theme, transcribed by Bill Dobbins
C. In the A sections, Ellington demonstrates how rich a simple three-voice

piano harmonization can sound when voiced in adjacent sixth intervals,
starting with the opening triad voicing: B–G–E. The emphasis of the
lowered fifths in the dominant chords of the B section adds a boppish
flavor.
After the opening 32-bar theme, Ellington’s improvisation is based
simply on 8-bar phrases in the key of C, with a modulation to the relative
key of A minor after sixteen measures. Two 16-bar A minor sections
follow, with a cadence back to C major at the end of each. The strong
establishment of these tonal centers made the pairing with Rockin’ in
Rhythm a natural one, since it alternates between the same two keys. Before
the main theme returns, Ellington plays two remarkable 8-bar strains that
are each repeated. The first makes thunderous use of the low register of
the piano (Example 4.13), in a manner that Beethoven would certainly
have appreciated. The second is a dizzying mixture of a driving syncopated
2-bar riff in the right hand with a three-beat, left-hand cross rhythm that
James P. Johnson favored. In the later versions with the orchestra, Ellington
would suddenly light into the original 4-bar introduction to Rockin’ in
Rhythm at the beginning of the seventh bar of the repetition, creating a
powerful dramatic effect.
In this initial version of “Kinda Dukish,” the entire opening theme
returns, ending with a reference to Monk’s Fifty-Second Street Theme and
the astonishing percussive effect of a strong accent on the lowest note of
the piano (A). It is interesting that Art Tatum sometimes ended rapid
ascending arpeggios on the highest note of the piano, even when that note
was not in the chord. Similarly, Ellington enjoyed surprising the listeners
by sometimes ending pieces with this low A, even when the piece was in a
completely unrelated key. Since the precise pitch of the highest and lowest
Example 4.14 Band Call (26 April 1954), B section, mm. 5–8, transcribed by
Bill Dobbins
notes on the piano is less perceptible than the others, they are well suited
to such dramatic or comic effect, as Tatum and Ellington recognized.
Piano Reflections was released two years before Bill Evans’s first record-
ings as a sideman. Although Bill Evans recorded a solo piano version of
“Reflections in D” on the 1978 album, New Conversations, he was unaware
of the Ellington recording.59 Nevertheless, his inclusion of the piece in his
repertoire speaks to the significance of Ellington’s previous exploration of
impressionistic vocabulary that is often associated with Evans. It is quite
enjoyable to listen to the Ellington and Evans recordings back-to-back, and
this experience reveals interesting similarities and differences in approach
between two iconic jazz piano masters.
From all the Capitol sessions with the Ellington orchestra, the most
unique piano work is found in the 1954 piece, Band Call. Reportedly,
Ellington often started the second set in nightclubs with this piece, liter-
ally to call the more lackadaisical members of the orchestra back to the
bandstand; and if some took a little longer than usual, Ellington’s playing
became more insistent and percussive.60 The theme has an unusual form
with an 8-bar A section and a 14-bar B section, the B section being unified
by an insistent walking line played by both piano and bass. The B section
begins with a simple one-bar riff emphasizing the sixth and tonic degrees
in A-flat (Example 4.14). The notes on the downbeats and syncopations
in the chromatic bass line suggest Bdim7 to A6/E for the first two mea-
sures, and Bm7 to A6/E for the next two. The first two measures return,
leading to a root-position A-flat chord and an Am6 chord with the fifth
in the bass. It soon becomes apparent, however, that these two measures of
A-flat were not the end of an 8-bar phrase, but the beginning of a new one.
59 Nat Hentoff, liner notes to Bill Evans, New Conversations, Warner Bros., BSK 3177, 1978, LP.
60 Stanley Dance, liner notes to The Complete Capitol Recordings of Duke Ellington, Mosaic 99362,
1995, compact disc boxed set.
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Example 4.15 Night Creature (16 March 1955), part two, mm. 1–3, transcribed by Bill
Dobbins
Ellington was an expert at placing these musical speed bumps in incon-

spicuous places to regain the listener’s attention. The stridently dissonant
A-flat right-hand voicing, facilitated by the thumb playing two adjacent
notes, sends out the loud and clear message, “Band Call, gentlemen. The
next set is already under way!”
On 16 March 1955, the Ellington orchestra with the Symphony of
the Air Orchestra premiered the three-movement Ellington work, Night
Creature. Arguably the most convincing of all the Ellington compositions
for symphony orchestra, the second movement contains one of the most
marvelous uses of the extreme registers of the piano in the history of
the instrument. The ghostly atmosphere at the opening and closing of
the movement is meant to portray, in Ellington’s words, “that imaginary
monster we all fear we shall have to meet some midnight, but when we
meet him I’m sure we shall find out that he too does the boogie-woogie.”61
A more charming description of the grim reaper has never been conjured.
The musical description is just as imaginative, with the top four notes
of the piano creating the finger-snaps on the off beats for the monster
lurking in the depths of the bass register (Example 4.15).
The popular rebirth of the Ellington orchestra following the unprece-
dented audience response at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival roughly
coincided with a long and extremely fruitful relationship with Columbia
records.62 The 1956 album, Ellington at Newport, included the extended
version of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, which features several cho-
ruses of Ellington’s energetic and imaginative blues playing before Paul
61 See Mark Tucker’s essay included in liner notes to Duke Ellington, The Reprise Studio
Recordings, Mosaic MD5–193, 1999, compact disc boxed set.
62 For insight into both the Newport Festival and the Columbia relationship, see Cohen, America,
321–9.
Gonsalves begins his legendary, 27-chorus odyssey that worked the audi-
ence up to a fever pitch. The 1957 Columbia release, Such Sweet Thunder,
also featured some memorable Ellington piano work, especially the raggy
waltz opening of “Lady Mac” and the uncanny improvised introduction
to “Sonnet in Search of a Moor.” In addition, the intimately revealing slow
blues solo on the title tune of the 1959 recording, Blues in Orbit, is one
of the best examples of Ellington’s ability to imbue each note with clear
intent and personality.63 For the most part, however, Ellington the pianist
is once again in the background throughout much of the Columbia ses-
sions. Still, his ever-present support as accompanist and supreme musical
team player helps to create many memorable moments on these excellent
recordings of the orchestra, certainly among the best of the later part of
his career.
Apart from the Capitol trio sessions, it is the fifth movement of the
Queen’s Suite, “The Single Petal of a Rose,” that contains some of Elling-
ton’s most personal piano work of the 1950s.64 The piece also has an
interesting historical background. While touring Great Britain with the
orchestra in 1958, Ellington was introduced to Queen Elizabeth II. This
meeting inspired the creation of The Queen’s Suite, which he recorded
at his own expense, having just one copy pressed, for her ears alone.
The recording was not released commercially until after Ellington’s death.
During his time in Leeds Ellington attended a party given by close friends
at their new apartment and, at one point in the evening, sat down to
play the baby grand piano he had just sent them as a house-warming
gift. Observing that one petal had fallen from the roses in the vase on the
piano, Ellington began to play the material that later became “The Single
Petal of a Rose.”65 Whether or not these musical ideas had previously been
occupying his imagination, the incident surely documents his knack for
the dramatic public gesture.
After a brief introduction that establishes the key of D-flat, “Single Petal”
begins with an AA1 AA1 BB1 AA1 formal design, followed by a slightly varied
repetition from B to the end. The content itself is simple yet poignant.
The main motive in the A sections is an ascending D-flat arpeggio in
the medium-low register that ends with the ascending whole step, E–
F. In this piece, the usual roles are reversed, with the left hand playing
most of the melodic content and the right hand supplying the harmonic
accompaniment. In the A sections, the material mainly alternates between
63 Duke Ellington, Blues in Orbit, Columbia CL-1445, 1960, LP.

64 Duke Ellington, The Ellington Suites, Pablo 2310–762, 1976, LP. 65 Jewell, Duke, 133–4.
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Example 4.16 “The Single Petal of a Rose” (from The Queen’s Suite, 14 April 1959),
first A1 section, mm. 5–8, transcribed by Bill Dobbins
the tonic and subdominant chords, concluding with a half cadence on

the dominant, A13. In the more extended A1 sections, however, the
harmony moves from the subdominant, G, to Gm7–5 , which brightens
the harmonic effect in this context. Although this chord wants to resolve
up to A7 or D/A, Ellington shifts suddenly to DMaj7, creating a feeling
of total harmonic surprise. Perhaps the effect of the Gm7–5 chord followed
by the abrupt diversion to DMaj7 (the enharmonic equivalent to EMaj7
in Example 4.16) depicts the petal’s break from the rose and its tumble to
the piano’s surface. Finally, the D major chord convincingly resolves by
half step to the tonic D6 chord, with Cadd9 interpolated as a harmonic
embellishment in the breathtaking final resolution.
The B section shifts to the relative key of B-flat minor, with just one
subtle change in the main thematic motive: the B-flat minor arpeggio ends
with a descending whole step, in contrast to the ascending whole step of
the A section. The right-hand accompaniment makes further emphasis of
this change. Where the right-hand chords of the A sections continue the
ascending gesture of the left-hand melody, the rapid right-hand arpeggios
of the B sections strengthen the effect of the descending whole step that
concludes the left-hand melodic gestures. The piece concludes with a
slowly ascending D6/9 arpeggio in perfect fourths with the damper pedal
sustained, and a final G and C, all shimmering like a quiet pond in the
moonlight, reflecting the entire scene.
The Later Years: International Tours, Personal Honors,

and the Sacred Concerts
The 1960s was a decade full of international travel for Ellington and
his orchestra, and the opening years were marked with particularly
memorable small-group recordings. These included the 1960 Columbia
recordings that were issued nineteen years later under the album title
Unknown Session.66 These tracks feature one of the best of the many Elling-
ton small bands assembled over the years. This group included Johnny
Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, Ray Nance, Lawrence Brown,
Aaron Bell, and Sam Woodyard. It featured economical but rich-sounding
arrangements of familiar Ellington and Strayhorn songs, with uniformly
exemplary solos and superb rhythm-section support. The same period
also included small group dates with Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane,
two recordings with Louis Armstrong, and two trio sessions (one with
Ellington’s rhythm section of Bell and Woodyard, and the other a highly
touted musical encounter with bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max
Roach).67 All of these recordings are excellent sources for further listening
and study with regard to Ellington’s exceptional comping skills. In fact,
Mingus was quick to point out that, whereas most pianists repeated many
of their comping voicings in one chorus after another, Ellington made use
of every conceivable texture in his comping, from single-note figures to
ten-note chords.68
In 1963, a European tour by the Ellington orchestra was soon followed
by a tour of the Middle East and the Far East that was sponsored by the
U.S. State Department. Although the subsequent Far East Suite was not
recorded until 1965, the music was inspired by the experiences of Ellington
and Strayhorn during this State Department tour. Moreover, Ellington’s
piano playing was not limited to a featured solo movement in the suites
that were composed during the 1960s and 1970s, but is heard more and
more in the exposition of important themes in orchestral movements as
well; and as some of the later suites were inspired by travels to foreign
lands, Ellington increasingly found ways to use the piano to decorate the
orchestral textures with colors and rhythms that reflected these ethnic
musical traditions.
66 Duke Ellington, Unknown Session, Columbia 35342, 1979, LP.

67 Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and The Great Reunion were for Roulette Records
(Roulette SR-52074, 1961, LP, and Roulette 400505, 1970, LP, respectively); Duke Ellington
Meets Coleman Hawkins and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane for Impulse! records (Impulse!
AS-26, 1962, LP, and Impulse! 8045, 1963, LP, respectively); Piano in the Foreground (with Bell
and Woodyard) for Columbia (Columbia CL2029, 1963, LP); and Money Jungle (with Mingus
and Roach) for United Artists, later reissued by Blue Note Records (UAJS 15017, 1963, LP; Blue
Note BNP25113, 1980, LP). Although Ellington the pianist sounds most comfortable on the
Armstrong and Hawkins sessions, the other recordings are fascinating in their mixture of
strong musical personalities that had rarely, if ever, made music together.
68 Mingus expounds on the exceptional creativity of Ellington’s comping in the film, A Duke
Named Ellington.
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Ellington also began to gain more of the kind of public recognition that
his accomplishments had always merited. In addition to popular honors
(such as the appearance of his portrait on the cover of Time magazine fol-
lowing the orchestra’s 1957 Newport Jazz Festival performance), Ellington
was awarded the President’s Gold Medal by order of Lyndon Johnson in
1966 and received the first of his numerous honorary degrees in 1967 (this
first being from Yale University).
It is interesting to note that at a time when he was absorbing so many
new impressions from travels throughout the world and writing some of
his most adventurous music for his orchestra, he also wrote the Second
Portrait of The Lion, a number that recalled his longtime admiration for the
piano playing of Willie “The Lion” Smith.69 Ellington’s initial Portrait of
The Lion, written in 1939, primarily featured the orchestra after the short
piano introduction. The second portrait is a solo piano piece with a ternary
form whose relation to the order of the material is exactly the opposite
of The Clothed Woman. The opening and closing sections here reflect
The Lion’s colorful stride piano style, with the contrasting material of the
middle section drawing on Ellington’s impressionistic vocabulary. After
a brief introduction, establishing the key of A, the opening phrase group
employs an AA1 BB form. The A sections feature a happy, syncopated
theme whose accompaniment utilizes walking bass, stride, and chords
moving at a half-note duration – all in a manner that perfectly suits the
melodic content. The contrary motion between the melody and bass line
is striking and effective. The first 8-bar A section modulates to the key of
C-sharp, ending with an E7 chord to return to the key of A. The second
A section modulates to B minor in its fifth and sixth measures, with
an incomplete Adim chord leading back to the key of A in the seventh
measure of the section. Ellington makes an interesting musical elision
here by beginning a new 4-bar phrase that extends the second A section
to ten measures. In the seventh bar, the F-sharp minor triad is used as
a pivot chord back to C-sharp in the eighth measure, where Ellington
then interpolates an F triad to return to A in the next bar, completing
the sequence of major chords at major-third intervals: A, C, F, and A
(Example 4.17). Although the temporary clash of the broken F-sharp
minor triad with a major seventh above the F triad in the eighth measure
is unusual, the combination of common tones and smooth voice leading
in the melodic line make the resolution to A6 in the section’s ninth bar
completely convincing.
69 Duke Ellington, Solos, Duets and Trios, Bluebird 2178–2-RB, 1990, compact disc.
Example 4.17 Second Portrait of The Lion (20 June 1965), second A section, mm. 7–10,
The key of F is more fully explored in the two 8-bar B sections in which
the thematic material conveys a strong blues character. A freewheeling
rubato transition leads to the long middle section, also in the key of F,
which is played in an open, ad libitum tempo and follows a basic CCDC
design. The melody of the C section consists of a succession of decorated
melodic long tones (A, B, B natural, C, C, and D) with the bass line
moving through the circle of fourths: F, E, A, D, G, C.70 The initial AA1 B
group then returns, and a concluding C section ends with an unresolved
B triad above the tonic F triad. In his later years, Ellington must have been
fascinated by this particular combination of major triads a tritone apart,
as it appears from time to time in pieces for the orchestra as well as in his
piano pieces.71
“The Shepherd,” from the posthumous 1974 album, Duke Ellington:
The Pianist (which contains recordings from 1966 and 1970), contains
one of his most striking blues themes in a minor key.72 The 16-bar
A section features somewhat rubato melodic statements, each followed
by a two-chord cadence, thereby providing an “amen” in the call-and-
response format. The B theme sets the tempo and continues the call-and-
response through the first eight measures of the 12-bar blues form. The
opening melodic phrases use the pentatonic fragment, E–G–A, answered
by harmonic responses of B7–9 to Em. In bars five and six of the cho-
rus, Ellington extends the melody’s range to B and D, adding a strong
blues color, and substitutes C7 for the more common subdominant,
70 These two elements were revisited in the more elaborately developed composition, A Chromatic
Love Affair, which was written in 1967 as a feature for Harry Carney’s baritone saxophone.
71 Two clear examples of these tritone triads are heard on the recording, . . . And His Mother Called
Him Bill (RCA LSP3906, 1968, LP): the piano introduction and ending to “After All”; and the
orchestra’s final F major chord at the end of “Day Dream,” to which Ellington adds a B triad.
72 Duke Ellington, The Pianist, Fantasy 9462, 1974, LP.
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Example 4.18 “The Shepherd” (18 July 1966), B theme, mm. 9–11, transcribed by Bill
Dobbins
A minor.73 After returning to E minor in bars 7 and 8, the melody again

emphasizes the blue note, B, but now accompanied by F7, a secondary
dominant to B7. Curiously, however, the melody and harmony are put
together in a manner that combines the B with the B7 chord, with the
melody’s enharmonic major seventh grinding against the lowered seventh
of the harmony (Example 4.18). Due to the smooth stepwise resolution
of the B to A and, finally, to the third of the E minor tonic chord, this
major seventh against a dominant seventh chord simply intensifies the
blues feeling. Ellington seemed to delight in breaking what many consid-
ered incontrovertible rules in ways that sounded completely convincing,
or even preferable, to the ear.
Of all the music that Ellington recorded in the 1960s and 1970s, there
is nothing in which his piano playing has such a prominent role as in the
aforementioned Far East Suite.74 Eight of the work’s nine movements were
inspired by the orchestra’s State Department tour of the Middle East in
1963, while “Ad Lib on Nippon” reflected impressions from a trip to Japan
in the following year. In “Depk,” sparked by the observation of a native
dance, Ellington’s percussive interjections and brief but sprawling solo,
beginning with an ascending sequence of Lydian arpeggios, contribute
enthusiastically to the festivities. In “Mount Harissa,” his statement of
the lengthy and captivating opening and closing theme exhibits effec-
tive modal overtones and an awareness of what Horace Silver had been
73 The dominant seventh on the lowered sixth degree in major or the natural sixth degree in
minor was already used by Ellington in Black and Tan Fantasy (recorded three times in 1927:
Brunswick 3526, Victor 21284, and Okeh 8521, all 78 rpm) and The Mooche (Victor 24486-B,
1928, 78 rpm). The lowered sixth degree of a key was perhaps his favorite harmonic color,
whether as a tone in an important functional harmony or as the bass note, in which case it may
or may not be the chord root. It is doubtful that any jazz pianist or composer found as many
variants of these colors as Ellington did.
74 Duke Ellington, The Far East Suite, RCA LSP-3781, 1967, LP.
doing,75 without the least hint of imitation in either case. Ellington’s intro-
duction to “Amad,” along with bassist John Lamb and drummer Rufus
Jones, forcefully and decisively establishes the proper ambience for the
Islamic call to prayer.76 Ellington then insistently hammers out the tonic
G as the powerful ensemble unison lines begin the spiritual entreaty in
earnest. Soon after the orchestra’s inspired ensemble playing reaches a
truly transcendent state, the majestic tone of Lawrence Brown’s trom-
bone begins to bring the listener back to the earthly plane as Ellington’s
disturbingly dissonant bell sound of adjacent ninth intervals (G above
middle C, the minor ninth, A, and the major ninth, B) announces the
end of this intensely moving devotional.
It is impossible to imagine these pieces creating the unbelievable impact
they deliver with any pianist other than Duke Ellington, and the final
composition, a mini suite in one uninterrupted movement, is the pièce
de résistance. “Ad Lib on Nippon” was a collaboration between Ellington
and clarinetist Jimmy Hamilton. Hamilton was largely responsible for the
fourth and final part, which also featured his agile abilities as clarinet
soloist.
Parts one and two of “Ad Lib on Nippon” feature some of Ellington’s
most adventurous pianistic writing in the minor blues format. The open-
ing gesture of rising fifth intervals, A–E–B–F seems to imply A Dorian,
but the continuation up to D is completely unexpected. It leaves the sonor-
ity suspended by withholding the third, whether major or minor. An even
greater surprise is waiting at the end of the second phrase, where the D is
extended upward to an octave B, with its unmistakably Oriental intent;
and while all the previous notes were played percussively and with no
pedal, the final D and B are sustained with the damper pedal. The third
phrase simply transposes the first down a fifth (to D-A-E-B-G), and the
fourth phrase is identical to the second. As is common in 12-bar blues, the
last four bars introduce a contrasting motive. Here Ellington uses a series
of dominant seventh chords with lowered fifths in the melody: F7, E7,
D7, and C7. The melody presents the third degree of the A minor tonality
for the first time, then descends in whole steps to F. The left-hand pickups
to the next measure continue the whole-step descents to E, the dominant
in A minor, after which bars three and four return to complete the chorus.
75 A good comparison can be heard, for example, in Silver’s “Enchantment,” from Horace Silver,
Six Pieces of Silver, Blue Note BLP 1539, 1957, LP.
76 In his later years, one of Ellington’s cryptic practices in finding titles was to reverse the first few
letters of a word or name. In this case, “Amad” comes from the first four letters of “Damascus.”
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Example 4.19 “Ad Lib on Nippon” (20 December 1966), second chorus, mm. 1–4,
This clear emphasis of a gradual descent provides an effective balance to

the steep melodic ascent in the other phrases.
In the second chorus, Ellington uses simple diatonic material for con-
trast. A two-note figure consisting of the dyads B-E and D-G proves to
be convincing in both the tonic and subdominant measures of the blues
form (Example 4.19). In bars nine and ten of the chorus, however, Elling-
ton uses the same series of descending, dominant seventh chords heard
earlier, thereby creating a link between the two choruses. The shock in this
chorus is the dissonant bell-like sound that punctuates the end of each
4-bar phrase. The top right-hand note of this chord, A, combines with
the left-hand voicing to suggest an A Phrygian harmony, including the
ever-present B. The lower right-hand notes are responsible for the harsh
dissonance, as each is a major seventh above the corresponding lower
notes of the left hand. The harmonic effect is similar to that used in the
grace-note harmonies of The Clothed Woman, but the pedal is not used to
catch the ring of the right-hand chord, leaving the left-hand chord clear
and unobscured.
Ellington’s piano also states the opening theme of the second part of
“Ad Lib on Nippon.” Whereas the theme of part one consisted mostly of
ascending lines with one important descending figure for contrast, the
theme of part two reverses these characteristics. The tempo is double
that of part one, and the first ten measures of the minor blues theme
consist mostly of descending eighth-note lines, with a sudden ascending
phrase providing contrast in the last two bars. The tonality here is a more
straightforward A minor, with a decided emphasis on the edgy color of
the major seventh. A contrasting 12-bar theme uses the thematic material
from the third chorus of part one (C–E–C–B–C), but transposed down
a step (to B–D–B–A–B), and played simply in octaves without the minor
second dissonances heard earlier. In measures nine and ten of this chorus
the descending series of dominant chords heard throughout part one is

simplified to the more basic sequence (of F7, B7, E7), before resolving to
AmMaj7 in bar eleven.
The remainder of part two features the orchestra in brilliant section and
full-ensemble writing. Just before the return of the main themes Ellington
exchanges short jabbing piano chords with powerful chords from the
orchestra, using this simple technique in an utterly majestic manner that
is all too rarely heard in jazz. Ellington hangs on to the G of the final
Am chord in part two and begins a rubato solo transition to part three
by reharmonizing it as the third of an Fm chord, and then as the lowered
thirteenth of an altered C7 chord, establishing the new key center of F
minor.
Part three consists of two themes, with the first played more freely
and developed more extensively, and is devoted entirely to Ellington’s
piano. The first statement of the A theme continues the A from the
transition as a melodic pedal tone throughout the 12-bar phrase. The
melody is mostly limited to the motive of adjacent fourths, E–A–B–
E. This group of intervals is developed in a different manner by Jimmy
Hamilton in the thematic material of part four. Although Ellington uses
the basic harmonies found in minor blues forms, he disrupts the expected
resolution from C7 back to F minor in bar nine, substituting the surprising
EMaj7. Moving through the circle of fourths to AMaj7, Ellington resolves
the harmony to the relative major key of A-flat in a manner that results in
a 12-bar phrase. This suggests a hybrid blues form that begins in a minor
key and ends in the relative major key. In the melody, the lower E of the
initial motive moves stepwise to D and, finally, to the third of the A-flat
tonic chord, C. In the pickup phrase to the second A theme statement,
Ellington transposes the main motive up a step to F–B–C–F. This new
combination of notes sounds completely fresh in relation to the original
chords, while maintaining the integrity of the melodic content of the first
A section. In the last four bars of the second A section, Ellington returns
to the melody as stated initially, with just a few octave displacements.
The B theme makes ingenious use of simple major triads in the left hand
(A–G–F–G–E-D–D), ending with a half cadence on E7. Because the
whole-note melody consists of colorful tones in relation to the accompa-
nying chords (D–E–D–A–B–E–F–F), the effect is magical. Except for
bars five to six, the melody and bass line move in contrary motion. This
theme is another strong example of Ellington’s economy of means. It is
amazing to hear how differently the same content sounds when orches-
trated for the full band at a fast swing tempo in part four. Ellington was
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able to take just a bit of what Hamilton wrote and, by simplifying the
harmony and slowing down the tempo, transform it so completely that
many listeners would never recognize the specific connection.
A single measure of D7+9 leads to the final A section and the completion
of Ellington’s thematic development in part three. Here Ellington uses the
melody notes of the second A section, but now transposes the original
harmonies up a step. The melody and harmony have the same relationship
as in the first A section, but now in the key of G minor. As the initial A
section ended in the relative major key of A-flat, the final A section ends
in the relative major key of B-flat, which is to be the key of part four.
Ellington eventually shifts into an improvised rubato cadenza to set up
the new key in a more imaginative manner, finally landing on the piano’s
lowest B. Jimmy Hamilton then takes over with a brief but captivating
unaccompanied clarinet cadenza that leads to part four and the relentlessly
swinging conclusion to “Ad Lib on Nippon.” Although there were several
more suites that followed the Far East Suite, none would feature either the
orchestra or Ellington’s piano in a more spectacular fashion.
As Ellington began the second half of his seventh decade, he accepted
an invitation to present what became his first Concert of Sacred Music on
16 September 1965 at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.77 The invitation
obviously struck a personal chord in him, as he responded, “Now I can say
openly what I have been saying to myself on my knees.”78 The Concert of
Sacred Music featured Ellington in a solo piano version of New World A-
Comin’, and the numerous recordings of this version stand convincingly
alongside the earlier orchestral versions. On 19 January 1968, the Ellington
orchestra premiered the Second Sacred Concert at the Cathedral Church of
St. John the Divine in New York.79 Of all the piano features in Ellington’s
long and fruitful career, none is more perfectly fashioned or more deeply
expressive than “Meditation,” from the Second Sacred Concert.
“Meditation” is related to Ellington’s earlier impressionistic piano
pieces, yet each one of these is quite distinctive from all the others.
The overall form of “Meditation” is ABAB1 CA1 B2 , with a brief coda that
returns to the opening motive of the piece. The A section’s melody is based
on an ascending half step, E–E, which is harmonized with an altered C7
chord resolving to FMaj9. This material is repeated and then the melody is
transposed down a step to D–D. while the harmony shifts to an altered F7
77 Duke Ellington, Concert of Sacred Music, RCA PL43663, 1966, LP.

79 Duke Ellington, Second Sacred Concert, Prestige 24045, 1968, LP set.
chord that resolves to B6/9Maj7. The half-step motive then moves down
a fourth to A–A, with the accompanying harmonies of D7+9+11 and G13.
The resolution of C to D in the triplet eighth note melodic figure refers
to the earlier D and D, and the G13 chord resolves deceptively to A minor
at the beginning of the B section.
The B section’s melody is based on the resolution of large leaps, first
jumping up to the fourth or eleventh of the A minor chord, and then
resolving stepwise to the third. The expressive repeated notes and melis-
matic ornamentation in the melody of the B section complement the
modal flavor of the harmonies, even though the music never really leaves
the tonal axis of F major and D minor.
The C section is a development section, transforming the melismatic
idea of the B section in relation to a new sequence of impressionistic
modal colors that suggest the modal piano pieces of Erik Satie, especially
his Trois Gymnopédies.80 This dramatically compelling section ends with
a suspended C dominant ninth chord with the third next to the ninth. In
this dense yet beautiful voicing, the third sounds like an upper extension,
hovering a major seventh above the fourth.
The A1 section that follows extends the A material to ten measures.
The closing B2 section begins like B1 , but eventually leads to a thundering
low octave C that generates an ascending series of F triad inversions. The
dynamic gradually fades to hushed tones and the intriguing suspended
C9 chord with the added third, leading back to the first two chords of
the piece. The final resonating FMaj9 chord is quietly adorned with a
mid-register B triad, rendering the attentive listener completely speech-
less, aglow in a transcendent state of consciousness. If “Kinda Dukish”
demonstrates how Ellington’s piano playing could succinctly epitomize
jazz, Meditation demonstrates just as clearly how his piano playing could
completely transcend jazz, reaching that state of expressive perfection that
Ellington described as “beyond category.”
Ellington’s growing realization of his own mortality may have brought
a heightened sense of presence to some of his performances during the
final years, including the last recording to focus on his piano playing,
a duo session with bassist Ray Brown.81 Maybe this was what Ellington
80 Any connection between Erik Satie and Ellington is likely the result of Ellington hearing
something in passing, such as Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies, no. 1, which was a very popular piece
during the late 1960s. (For instance, one can hear a small-group arrangement of this
composition on the eponymous second LP of the group, Blood, Sweat and Tears, from 1969.)
81 Recorded in December 1973, the music was released on the Pablo label under the title This
One’s for Blanton (Pablo 2310721, 1975, LP).
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Example 4.20 Mood Indigo, comparison of the A theme, mm. 1–4, with corresponding
Ellington introductions or solos, transcribed by Bill Dobbins
17 October 1930
11 May 1945
31 May 1964
11 May 1966*
was feeling in 1973, when he was asked why it was taking him so long to
complete his Third Sacred Concert. He replied, “You can jive with secular
music, but you can’t jive with the Almighty.”82
Perhaps the best way to get a brief overview of Ellington’s lifelong
evolution as a pianist is to compare different solo treatments of the opening
four measures of Mood Indigo, certainly one of his most enduring melodies
(Example 4.20). We begin with the first four measures of the ensemble
version of Mood Indigo from 17 October 1930, with the beautiful individual
lines for muted trumpet and trombone, clarinet, and bass. Following this
82 Jewell, Duke, 217.

orchestrated version are Ellington’s solo interpretations from 11 May

1945, January 1956 (featuring Rosemary Clooney), 31 May 1964 (live),
and 11 May 1966.83 Each version follows a particular method of harmonic
variation or substitution in a logically consistent yet imaginative and
musically satisfying manner. Probably none of them were improvised
entirely on the spur of the moment, but rather evolved gradually over
time. From the hundreds of recordings of Mood Indigo by the Ellington
orchestra, there are other versions that are also worthy of attention, but
these four suffice to put Ellington in a class by himself among jazz pianists.
Without going into a measure-by-measure analysis, it is worth noting that
the most special harmony in the early orchestration, the simple F minor
triad at the beginning of bar 3, is nowhere to be found in any of the later
solo versions; nor does Ellington ever revert to the common progression
heard in bar 3 on most recordings of Mood Indigo apart from those made
by Ellington and those Ellingtonians who really knew the piece: Cm7
to F7+5 . Many jazz musicians have paid lip service to Ellington’s music
over the years, but few have really studied even the handful of Ellington
and Strayhorn tunes that are far too often passed off as an adequate
representation of a truly vast repertoire.
Conclusion
In concluding what could be considered a highly detailed introductory

chapter in the epic saga of Ellington’s unique contribution to jazz piano
playing, it should be clear by now that there is no jazz pianist whose
piano music and piano playing has exceeded the mixture of stylistic range
and expressive depth to be found in the pieces presented here; and these
represent only the tip of the iceberg. While it is true that Ellington was
never the kind of improviser who spun out chorus after chorus of thematic
content developed from a particular melody or chord progression (as Paul
Gonsalves did, for example), he was nevertheless an incomparable master
of finding endless variations of a set piece or making slightly different
solos each night from the same basic ideas (as Johnny Hodges did). For
Ellington, the quality of a solo statement had more to do with the clarity of
83 Jungle Band, Mood Indigo; Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Mood Indigo, Victor
D5VB264–1, 1945, 78 rpm; Rosemary Clooney and Duke Ellington, Blue Rose, Columbia
CL-872, 1956, LP; the 31 May 1964 performance can be heard on Duke Ellington, All Star Road
Band, vol. 2, Doctor Jazz Records W2X40012, 1985, LP; and the 11 May 1966 performance can
be heard on Duke Ellington, The Popular Duke Ellington, RCA LSP-3576, 1966, LP.
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the impression left behind than the number of notes or choruses played.
(Monk obviously shared this point of view.) Unfortunately, this aspect of
improvisation, the ability to play the same melody differently every night
yet make each version seem like it must be the definitive one, has become
a neglected goldmine.
It can certainly be argued that subtle variations of an exceptional set
piece can ultimately be more rewarding than ten choruses of technical
display in which the theme has been forgotten before the first chorus is
finished. As Ellington reflected on the role of improvisation in jazz, he
said, “Anyone who plays anything worth hearing knows what he’s going
to play, no matter whether he prepares a day ahead or a beat ahead. It
has to be with intent.”84 Indeed, it is sobering to begin to comprehend
just how much Duke Ellington contributed to the timeless legacy of jazz
piano playing between the late 1920s and 1974, the year of his passing. In
light of everything that has been documented about Ellington’s music up
to this point in time, it seems like much of this unparalleled contribution
was made while nobody was looking. It is time to start looking now.

5 “People Wrap Their Lunches in Them”: Duke
Ellington and His Written Music Manuscripts
walter van de leur
Throughout his career, Duke Ellington often referred to the process of

writing music – meaning, the act of actually committing it to paper,
using pencil and eraser.1 Indeed, he left a large body of written music
manuscripts. But the relation between Ellington’s autographs and the per-
formances and recordings of his orchestra is not straightforward. Clearly,
Ellington’s goal was performance. He never sought to publish his origi-
nal orchestral scores in print, and this disinterest further obscured how
performance and notation are connected in his music. This situation has
led scholars to gloss over the role of notation in Ellington’s music, thereby
leading some writers to downplay its importance in his music practice.
Moreover, mystifications and comparisons with classical music notation
(frequently from a rather limited understanding of the latter practice)
have often served to demonstrate Ellington’s uniqueness.
In this essay, I discuss both the role of music notation in jazz in gen-
eral, and in Ellington’s compositional strategies in particular. In spe-
cific, I investigate the following key questions around the latter subject:
How are Ellington’s written scores and performances connected? What
role did music notation play in his creative process? And, lastly, how
does his notated music compare to the other compositional practices he
applied?
Before we turn to the particularities in Ellington’s notated music, it is
important to understand music notation in general. The history of music
notation systems harks back to centuries-old civilizations, including those
of North Africa, Asia, and Europe. In Western Europe, a symbolic-linear
musical notation system gradually developed over the course of centuries
into what is now known as modern music notation. It uses a five-line
staff on which various symbols – such as clefs, key signatures, notes, dots,
1 This essay builds on research delivered at various conferences and taught at various
conservatory courses. Parts of this work have been published in German in “Scores of Scores:
Einige Anmerkungen zu Manuskripten der Billy-Strayhorn- und Duke-Ellington-Sammlungen
in den USA,” in Duke Ellington und die Folgen, ed. Wolfram Knauer (Hofheim: Wolke, 2000),
225–47. The author wishes to thank Michael Fitzgerald, Sjef Hoefsmit, John Howland, Bruce
Boyd Raeburn and Michiel Schuijer. 157
158 walter van de leur
ties, and accidentals – represent pitches, rhythmic values, phrasing, and

accents. Additional (abbreviated) text markings indicate instrumentation,
dynamics, character, and tempo. This notational system is most visibly
connected to European concert-music practice – commonly referred to
as classical music – but this notation tradition is used in other musical
genres as well. (In addition, of course, a number of other sophisticated
musical notation systems exist.)
It is important to distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive
notation.2 Most notation is prescriptive: it provides performers with visual
guidelines that allow them to translate a particular piece into actual sound.
On the other hand, descriptive notation aims to capture an actual perfor-
mance (usually a recorded performance) in written symbols.
Translating notation into actual sound is a complex process. Performers
need to understand the many conventions and practices that underlie any
notational system. These practices are not necessarily explicit, but reside
in what is termed tacit knowledge. Modern music notation transmits
certain musical parameters quite well – pitch, meter, rhythmic subdivi-
sion, etc. – but other qualities remain vague, such as dynamics, tempo
fluctuations, sound and timbre, and intonation. According to Nicholas
Cook, musicians who perform a Mozart string quartet “may well play the
notes exactly as Mozart wrote them . . . yet [they] don’t play them exactly
as Mozart wrote them, because every note in the score is subject to the
contextual negotiation of intonation, precise dynamic balance, articula-
tion, rhythmic subtleties, timbral quality, and so forth.”3 Such negotiation
deals largely with parameters that are poorly transmitted by the score, and
this is where performers need to draw upon their tacit knowledge. This
knowledge becomes apparent both in their performative skills, and their
understanding of repertoire and style. Tacit knowledge is largely learned
in practice – it is mostly transmitted orally. Therefore, the farther we are
removed from the musical practices that produced specific musical texts,
the more difficulty we will have translating such potential music into
actual music.
The so-called historically informed performance practice of early clas-
sical music is a case in point. Sympathizers with this movement seek to
faithfully reconstruct the original intentions of the composer, as expressed
2 See Charles Seeger, “Prescriptive and Descriptive Music-Writing,” The Musical Quarterly 44
(1958): 184–95.
3 Nicholas Cook, “Making Music Together, or Improvisation and Its Others,” The Source:
Challenging Jazz Criticism 1 (2004): 15.
“People Wrap Their Lunches in Them” 159
through a score, or try to come to historically authentic performances.4

Nevertheless, ongoing research on musical texts, treatises, and other
sources (such as instruments, performance practices, and contexts) invari-
ably leads to ever-changing interpretations and vehement debates over
what this authenticity is. After all, scores are full of uncertainties with
respect to tempo, tuning, phrasing, dynamics, instrumentation, articula-
tion, embellishments, timbre, and so forth. Even though this music was
created in a literate culture, its context was orally transmitted through
apprenticeship, observation, and practice. This practice of musical orality
is the main topic in Richard Taruskin’s 1995 collection of essays titled
Text and Act. Taruskin maintains that the musical process simply cannot
be captured in writing, and that therefore any attempt to glean historic
verisimilitude from documents will inevitably fail.5
Still, prescriptive notation has wielded tremendous authority in classical
music practices of the last two centuries, up to the point where many
believe that musicians have no other option than to execute the notated
music as closely and exactly as possible.6 Clearly, such a limited view
overlooks the ambiguities of music notation, and ignores the complexities
of classical music performance. As Richard Middleton has warned, with
this growing emphasis on the notated score in analysis comes the danger
of a “notational centricity . . . [which] tends to equate the music with the
score. This leads to an overemphasis on features that can be notated easily
(such as fixed pitches) at the expense of others which cannot (complex
rhythmic detail, pitch nuance, sound qualities).”7
The ultimate consequence of such notational centricity is the reification
of the musical score. According to Taruskin, this often leads to a failure
“to make the fundamental distinction between music as tones-in-motion
and music as notes-on-page.”8 (As should be apparent, Taruskin has
been a major opponent of the historically informed performance practice
4 Certain jazz repertory orchestras similarly strive for historically authentic performances. Here,
recordings set the standard, and the goal is to reproduce the music as accurately as possible.
5 See Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995).
6 For instance, the eHow website contributor, Carl Harper, suggests that “Classical musicians
usually perform musical notes exactly as written out on the page by a composer.” Carl Harper,
“The Difference Between Classical Music and Jazz Music,” at www.ehow.com/about 6508509
difference-between-classical-jazz-music.html (accessed 27 September 2014).
7 Richard Middleton (ed.), Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4.
8 Richard Taruskin, “The Authenticity Movement Can Become a Positivistic Purgatory,
Literalistic and Dehumanizing,” Early Music 12 (February 1984): 3–12.
movement.) An opposite view was once expressed by Arnold Schoenberg,

who said both that “music need not be performed any more than books
need to be read aloud, for its logic is perfectly represented on the printed
page,” and that “the performer, for all his intolerable arrogance, is totally
unnecessary except as his interpretations make the music understandable
to an audience unfortunate enough not to be able to read it in print.”9 In
such comments, Schoenberg seems to overlook that much as the recipe is
not the soup, the score is not the music. Of course, he knew this point full
well – his remark was mostly an ironic stab at performers. Indeed, as shown
in recent studies of the 1940s recordings of Schoenberg as conductor of
his own Pierrot Lunaire, he too allowed for different interpretations of his
work.10
Descriptive notation captures an actual (recorded) performance into
written symbols. In jazz, such notation is commonly referred to as a
transcription.11 Scholars and musicians transcribe music for which so
far no notation existed (such as folk musics, improvised musics, etc.), or
for which the original notation is lost. Transcribing recorded music is a
widespread practice in jazz. Jazz transcriptions can serve different goals,
which are not necessarily clearly delineated. For example, a transcription
can be aimed at performance or at study and analysis (and often both).
A performance transcription enables the recreation of the original
recording from which the music is taken. Descriptive notation now
becomes prescriptive. Such recreation can try to be as literal as possi-
ble – a reproduction, as it were – or it can be aimed at reinterpretation,
where the performers deal with the music as if no previous recording
exists. Either way, it is a complex process that involves many decisions.
The transcriber can choose to fully write out improvised solos and rhythm
section parts, or they can decide to reconstruct the score that the original
performers might have had available to work from. The amount of tacit
knowledge that can be assumed has to be factored in as well. For example,
scores aimed at amateur performers tend to carry more articulation signs
than those created for professionals.
9 These comments were recalled by Dika Newlin, a former student of Schoenberg’s, in Dika
Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollection, 1938–76 (New York: Pendragon
Press, 1980), 164.
10 Avior Byron, “The Test Pressings of Schoenberg Conducting Pierrot Lunaire: Sprechstimme
Reconsidered,” Music Theory Online 12 (2006), at www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.06.12.1/toc.12
.1.html (accessed 17 September 2015).
11 In European classical music, transcription can also refer to rewriting a piece of music for
another instrument or ensemble than for which it was originally written.
While a transcription can be based on a single recording, it can also try to

reconstruct the “original” musical text from multiple existent recordings,
which can include alternate takes, different sessions, and live recordings.
Original scores and parts in the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection
show that different recordings of a title are often based on the same written
material. Such recordings can help to reconstruct the original material,
but this process is still quite complicated. For instance, two recordings,
even if based on the same manuscript, can differ to various degrees.
Ellington may have changed the order of musical sections, musicians may
have altered their phrasing, articulation, and dynamics, they may have
made mistakes, the rhythm section might play differently, and the solos
will differ. With such variations, it is inherently difficult for a transcriber
to decide what the original score might have looked like. Even if the
original chart is accurately reconstructed (which can only be known if at
some point the manuscript score surfaces), its status as an authoritative
text is still not clear. Composers in the European concert-music tradition
have often overseen the publication of their work in print. The published
version can therefore be taken as “the work” (although here too there are
many problems and issues).12 By contrast, as noted, Ellington published
his scores on records rather than in print. Recordings then constitute “the
work,” rather than his autograph scores. The precise delimitation of the
nature and extent of these works is still debatable, since the recorded
versions tend to differ, and Ellington’s pieces were notoriously in a state
of flux. This issue may be illustrated by the fact that the seemingly simple
job of establishing how many titles Ellington composed has turned out to
be a daunting task, with quite different outcomes, depending on how one
defines an Ellington “work.”13
12 These may range from mistakes in editions to composers who keep changing their materials. A
case in point are the editions of Chopin’s piano music, of which many versions circulate.
Chopin often published a manuscript in small quantities in different countries with different
publishers. He would later make changes and corrections, but his publishers and students
made changes as well. As a result, Chopin’s published piano music differs from his autographs,
which can be ambiguous as well, and therefore do not necessarily bear out what the composer
had in mind. See for instance Eva Badura-Skoda, “Textual Problems in Masterpieces of the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” The Musical Quarterly 51 (1965): 301–17; and Oswald
Jonas, “On the Study of Chopin’s Manuscripts,” Chopin-Jahrbuch (Vienna: Internationale
Chopin-Gesellschaft, 1956), 142–55.
13 On the subject of counting Ellington’s production, a good overview of the various issues can be
found in Jørgen Mathiasen, “Duke Ellington’s Production as a Composer: A Survey of a
Selection of Sources to his Entire Production and a Methodological Discussion,” www
.roundaboutjazz.de/depages/Survey.htm (accessed 27 September 2014). Mathiasen estimates
that Ellington wrote and co-wrote about 1,700 works. Mathiasen’s list includes some hundred
Often a transcription serves to facilitate musical analysis. If the anal-

ysis is aimed at pitch-relationships and general rhythmic traits, standard
notation can do the job. But if the focus is on different parameters, stan-
dard notation may fall short. Therefore, musicologists have developed
alternative notational systems in order to transcribe musics or musical
traits that would be misrepresented in standard Western notation. Nev-
ertheless, any transcription system must answer to the specific analytical
perspectives of the transcriber. For instance, in order to more accurately
represent the kind of rhythmic displacement that tends to occur in jazz,
Milton Stewart proposes a system of grid notation for jazz transcriptions.14
Others adapt standard notation to meet specific analytical goals. Regard-
less of the approach though, it is important that the transcriber is aware
of the analytical purposes of the transcription. Just as with prescrip-
tive notation, the issues that surround descriptive notation are manifold,
regardless of the genre in question. No music can simply be captured
in notation, and every notational system has its limitations. Clearly, one
must be careful not to unquestioningly use a transcription for musical
analysis, since even when it comes to only notating the pitches, the score
will in all likelihood have mistakes, and this may lead to questionable
interpretations.15
The apparent importance of notation in European concert-music prac-
tice is often used to demonstrate how jazz and classical music are differ-
ent. Since one of the defining qualities of jazz is improvisation, it is often
assumed that musical literacy is hardly a requirement for jazz musicians.
Conversely, in classical music, musical literacy has taken on tremendous
importance. Furthermore, it is argued, jazz is largely rooted in aurally and
titles of suites as well as their separate movements (e.g., Perfume Suite and Dancers in Love),
and at least fifty works that I have positively ascribed to Strayhorn (including Smada, Your Love
Has Faded, Overture to a Jam Session, Cashmere Cutie, Isfahan, and Day Dream; see Van de
Leur, Something, Appendices B–D. With the latter adjustments, this makes about 1,550 known
(co-)compositions a better estimate. See also Jørgen Mathiasen, “Title key to Duke Ellington’s
oeuvre,” www.roundaboutjazz.de/depages/titlekey.htm (accessed 27 September 2014), and
Erik Wiedemann, “Duke Ellington: The Composer,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 5 (1991):
37–64. Despite this documentation, such prominent sources as the 2009 Jazz, by Scott DeVeaux
and Gary Giddins, persist in stating that Ellington “wrote . . . thousands of instrumental
miniatures.” (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 132.
14 See Milton L. Stewart, “Grid Notation: A System for Jazz Transcription,” Annual Review of Jazz
Studies 1 (1982): 3–12.
15 For examples of misheard notes in transcriptions of Ellington orchestra recordings, see Van de
Leur, Something, 291n4, and Scott DeVeaux, “The Early Years by Mark Tucker; Duke Ellington:
Jazz Composer by Ken Rattenbury” (review), The Musical Quarterly 76 (Spring 1992): 121–35,
passim.
orally transmitted traditions which seem diametrically opposed to the

written traditions that have dominated European music practices. How-
ever, as explained above, literate musical cultures rely heavily on orality
too. In any musical genre, prescriptive notation requires a deep under-
standing of the musical practice that has produced the score.
Some jazz scholars argue that due to its special characteristics, jazz
cannot be truly notated. For these proponents, the music’s very refusal
to be adequately captured on paper thus shows its uniqueness. It is true
that characteristics of jazz – such as improvisation, individual sound
quality, rhythmical nuances, variable intonation, idiosyncratic accents
and phrasing, and ensemble interaction – simply cannot be accurately
captured in standard musical notation, as numerous jazz transcribers
readily admit.16 Yet, as explained above, music notation is a challenge
in any genre. The task of transcribing a Cootie Williams solo can be as
complicated as transcribing a piece of Carnatic music. The problems may
vary from genre to genre, and from piece to piece, but all music is difficult
to notate, and all notation is difficult to perform. Therefore, it is not
possible to draw clear lines between various music genres on the basis of
notation practices.
Contrary to what has often been claimed and implied, notation has
always played a role in jazz. David Chevan’s research on musical literacy
in the 1920s and 1930s bears out that even many early jazz musicians
were musically literate.17 They often received formal or informal musical
instruction in school, or from a band member, or they studied with a
private music teacher. Sooner or later, most jazz musicians learned to read
(and write) music. The pianist Lil Hardin, for instance, reports that she
wrote out the arrangements and “even the solos” for the first Louis Arm-
strong Hot Five sessions in July 1926.18 Musical literacy greatly enhanced
a musician’s career opportunities, since knowing how to read music gave
access to jobs in all kinds of aggregations – from marching bands, circus
and tent show bands, pit bands in movie theatres and vaudeville shows,
to dance orchestras and recording studio bands.
16 See, for instance, Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 64n14 and 123n43. A transcription of a classical
performance would run into exactly the same problems.
17 See David Chevan, Written Music in Early Jazz (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1997);
David Chevan, “Musical Literacy and Jazz Musicians in the 1910s and 1920s,” Current
Musicology 71–3 (Spring 2001–Spring 2002): 200–31.
18 William Russell, interview with Lillian Hardin Armstrong, 1 July 1959, Hogan Jazz Archive
Oral Histories Collection, 1943–2002, item 45, Reel I.
Where at first jazz bands could work with so-called head arrangements
that were worked out during rehearsals, across the 1920s, the growing size
of ensembles and the increasing complexity of the arrangements inevitably
called for notation. In the swing orchestras of the 1930s and 1940s – part
of an industry that employed thousands of jazz musicians – reading music
was virtually a sine qua non.
There is extensive documentation on written practices in jazz. Apart
from oral histories which stress that musicians read and often wrote music,
in hundreds of photographs musicians can be seen reading music on
the bandstand. Archival jazz collections house impressive repositories
of handwritten music manuscripts pertaining to the careers of dozens
of early jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, “Jelly Roll” Morton,
Mary Lou Williams, Charlie Barnet, Jimmie Lunceford, Claude Thornhill,
and Duke Ellington. Yet relatively little attention has been given to this
written practice in Jazz Studies, and one cannot help but get the feeling
that for some those reams of written music carry an unwelcome message
that counteracts notions of jazz’s unique orality.
In 1988, the Smithsonian Institution acquired about 310 cubic feet (8.7
cubic meters) of archival material from Mercer Ellington that documented
the career of his father.19 Today this material is archived in sixteen series.
The collection contains sound recordings, photographs, business records,
scrapbooks, publicity materials, books, and awards. More than half of the
material (166.6 cubic feet, or 4.7 cubic meters) is located in Series 1: Music
Manuscripts. This material forms
the largest series in the Collection and includes original manuscripts (parts and
scores), [copyist’s] scores, lead, lyric and copyright sheets, published music and
arrangements of compositions by Duke Ellington and his main collaborator, Billy
Strayhorn . . . The bulk of the scores and parts are hand-written by Ellington, Stray-
horn or Tom Whaley (Ellington’s chief copyist, ca. 1942–69).20
These materials are now stored in over 470 archival boxes. More materials
pertaining to Ellington and his closest collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, are
housed in the Billy Strayhorn Collection (in the possession of his estate).
Beyond published sheet music, the latter source includes some seven
hundred scores in Strayhorn’s hand, close to five dozen autographs by
Ellington, original music by the likes of Luther Henderson, (Ellington
19 This does not account for another 300 cubic feet of music stands, awards, clothing, and other
band ephemera (including Ellington’s electric piano for travel).
20 For notes on scope and content, as well as history and provenance of the Duke Ellington
Collection, see http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/d5301.htm (accessed 27 September 2014).
band trumpeter) Freddie Jenkins, and others, and numerous copyist’s

scores and parts in the hands Juan Tizol, Thomas Whaley, John Sanders,
Herbie Jones, and various unidentified extractors.21
Most all of these materials – from both collections – were part of the
library of an orchestra that was year-round on the road. Therefore, scores
often miss pages, and sets of parts often are incomplete. Music Manuscripts
Sub-Series 1D, “Unidentified Music,” consists of boxes full of loose pages
and untitled scores that cannot be identified (over the last twenty years,
thanks to the work of archivists and scholars, hundreds of such orphaned
pages have been reunited with their parent documents). Moreover, it is
safe to assume that Ellington produced more written music than currently
survives. Still, many of Ellington’s works are documented in full, whether
through original autograph scores, sets of copied instrumental parts, or
copyist’s scores.
In light of this overwhelming evidence that notated music played a
crucial role in the gestation of the Ellington orchestra’s music, it is incom-
prehensible that the numerous articles and books on Ellington that have
appeared since the Duke Ellington Collection became publicly accessi-
ble dedicate precious little attention to his autograph scores.22 Andrew
Homzy – who was among the first Ellington scholars to go through the
Smithsonian Institution’s newly acquired collection – warned researchers
not to overlook this important resource: “Today, anyone claiming to be a
scholar of Ellingtonia and jazz must acknowledge and conduct research in
this treasure trove of documents and information.”23 Yet, the few texts that
do refer to Ellington’s written music often tend to downplay its importance
and relevance. In Jazz, for example – which promises to be the textbook
of choice for generations of jazz appreciation course college instructors to
come – Scott DeVeaux and Gary Giddins do exactly that:
European classical music has taught us to think of composers as working in isolation,

scribbling music on manuscript paper for others to perform. Ellington could work
this way. Whenever he traveled, he carried with him a pad of paper and a pencil
in his pocket. At odd moments throughout the day . . . he jotted down ideas as
they came to him . . . Ellington liked collaborating with his musicians. Rather than
21 For more on Strayhorn’s autographs, his compositions, and his collaboration with Ellington,
see Van de Leur, Something.
22 For an inventory of Ellington-themed writings, see “Duke Ellington: Biography and
Bibliography,” http://www.jazzinstitut.de/jazz-index-duke-ellington/?lang=de (accessed 14
January 2017).
23 Andrew Homzy, “Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer by Ken Rattenbury” (review), Notes 48
(1992): 1241–6.
present them with a score, he would invite the band to work with him: explaining
the mental picture that inspired it, playing parts, and assigning musicians roles.24
Ellington not only could work like his European classical colleagues, he
most often did. He would not just jot “down ideas as they came to him,” but
as a rule developed his ideas into written-out compositions, prior to taking
them to his orchestra. Also, it should be noted here that classical composi-
tion practices are much more complex and diverse than “scribbling music
on manuscript paper for others to perform.” Rather, many classical com-
posers (e.g., Felix Mendelssohn, Anton Bruckner, and Johannes Brahms)
regularly altered and revised their written music, so that in those oeuvres
too, it is not clear what exactly constitutes “the work.” Moreover, other
classical composers were the main performers of their own compositions
(e.g., Johann Sebastian Bach, Arcangelo Corelli, and Frédéric Chopin) and
often strayed from the written notes. In the twentieth century, composers
completely redefined music notation by embracing graphic scores (Mor-
ton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Yuji Takahashi), open form (Earle
Brown, John Cage), and deliberately unplayable scores (Brian Ferney-
hough’s new complexity). And, lastly, with Ellington’s practice in mind,
it should be observed that classical composers have often collaborated
closely with the performers of their music (Brahms, Luciano Berio).
DeVeaux and Giddins also describe some of the material in the Duke
Ellington Collection:
No permanent record survives for Ellington’s music, which was reconceived when-
ever new soloists entered the band. There’s a set of scores at the Smithsonian Insti-
tution, derived from recordings and manuscripts, that combine carefully notated
Ellington harmonies with vague verbal directions (for example, “Tricky ad lib,”
meant for Sam Nanton to take a solo). They were presented to Ellington on his
sixtieth birthday; the composer thanked everyone, but forgot to take the scores
home. He knew his music could not be contained by notation.25
That Ellington’s music “could not be contained by notation” is true,

but then again, no music can. DeVeaux and Giddins suggest here that
Ellington’s scores were quite cryptic, and in the end were of little relevance
to the composer himself. Even though many other authors have made
similar statements, this assumption could not be further from the truth.26
24 Italics in original. DeVeaux and Giddins, Jazz, 212. 25 Ibid.

26 The scores mentioned by DeVeaux and Giddins hardly contained Ellington autographs. They
were indeed “derived from recordings and manuscripts,” and consisted of copyist scores
(mostly lead sheets) compiled by friends, band members, and family for Ellington’s sixtieth
As a rule, beyond Billy Strayhorn, the only people who laid eyes on
Ellington’s scores during his life were his copyists, who translated the
music manuscripts into fairly standard instrumental parts for the vari-
ous band members. The orchestra relied on written parts, so much that
many were written on customized music paper with Ellington’s signature
printed in the bottom right-hand corner. Among the myths surrounding
the Ellington orchestra are stories of music written on napkins, match-
boxes, hotel stationery, and shirt sleeves.27 Precious few examples of this
“practice” survive, and I strongly suspect that a composer who ordered
personalized manuscript paper had little reason to resort to such awkward
writing materials. If there is any substance to those stories, they must be
considered exceptions to the rule.
Ellington’s scores were not intended for usage outside the orchestra, and
this limited environment allowed him to develop a number of economic
notational short-cuts. His copyists had to be familiar with the at times
non-standard notation conventions that he used, but these conventions
were not as complex as has been suggested, for instance by his son Mercer,
who recounted that
The lack of formal knowledge set him [Ellington] on a way of creative thinking that
others hadn’t approached. Then he learned that there was a way of writing it down
and still have it make sense. Yet after he learned to write, he wrote in such a cryptic
fashion that the average person couldn’t figure out what he was doing. He’d put
clefs that really didn’t belong on that particular staff, and he had a system of not
changing the accidental so long as the accidental didn’t belong to the particular part
that that instrument was playing. For example, in one place there would be a chord
with a G flat in it, and another chord later with just a G in it, with nothing on it. You
would assume it was G flat, but it wasn’t. It was because the guy playing the third
alto part never played a G prior to that, so there was no necessity to put a G natural
in front of it. As a result, people who had a chance to look at the music, and maybe
play it, found it didn’t make sense. And, of course, it sounded horrible.28
Yet, Mercer Ellington’s account does not hold up when one considers the
majority of the actual documents. Among the many surviving scores, “I
birthday. These sheets were organized in twenty-four so-called Presentation Albums (blue,
leather-bound volumes). The idea was to give an overview of Ellington’s composing career
(hence including no arrangements or reworked versions), rather than to collect his autographs.
Among other sources, see Hasse, Beyond, 336.
27 DeVeaux and Giddins recount how an unnamed “bassist found his entire part for a piece
scrawled on a cocktail napkin.” DeVeaux and Giddins, Jazz, 212.
28 Mercer Ellington and Stanley Dance, Duke Ellington in Person: An Intimate Memoir (New York:
Da Capo, 1979), 43.
Never Felt This Way Before” can serve as a case in point. It was a romantic
pop song recorded for Victor Records in two takes with singer Herb Jeffries
on 28 October 1940.29 The number was also recorded live at the Crystal
Ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota, 7 November 1940.30 In addition, an
earlier instrumental version of the piece had been recorded for Columbia
on 14 October 1939.31
Though somewhat idiosyncratic and incomplete, the score is far from
cryptic. The key is B-flat, and the score is notated in concert pitch. The clefs
may change from system to system, but they are not out of the ordinary.32
The first system gives a harmonized melody for “Wallace [Jones, trum-
pet], [Juan] Tizol (valve-trombone), and [Barney Bigard on] Clar[inet].”
Remarkably, the rhythm section is absent, which is customary in Elling-
ton’s scores. Since “I Never Felt” is a 32-bar ABAC song, the chord changes
and the form of the arrangement could easily be explained to the rhythm
section in rehearsal. Similarly, there is no vocal part further down the
score. Jeffries must have learned the tune directly from Ellington. Themes
are often missing in Ellington’s scores; if they were not already known to
the soloist (as was the case with many of his famous pieces), they were
typically provided directly on a part, to save time. Other performance
indications – such as dynamics, tempo, slurs, and accents – are missing
too. These sorts of musical instructions were simply worked out on the
bandstand.
Bars five and six of Ellington’s first chorus call for a repeat of mm.
1–2. Ellington has left the bars empty and numbered them 1 and 2.
The copyist will write out those bars in the musicians’ parts, which will
also be transposed. Throughout, Ellington carefully notates naturals and
courtesy accidentals. To avoid confusion, he gives an F-sharp a courtesy
accidental in system 4, bar 2. Although this latter detail might seem to
be consistent with Mercer Ellington’s description (accidentals are only
valid for one particular voice), elsewhere in this score there are passages
29 The score is in the Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1, Box 156, folders 8–10. For further
details, email the author at w.vandeleur@ahk.nl. For an example of Ellington’s music
handwriting see Van de Leur, Something, Appendix A.
30 Take 1 was reissued on Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band, Bluebird 5659–2-RB, three
compact-disc set, 1986, take 2 on Duke Ellington, The Works of Duke, vol. 12, RCA
FXM1–7094, LP, 1975. The live recording was reissued on Duke Ellington, Live at Fargo, ND,
Vintage Jazz Classics 1020–2, two compact-disc set, 1990.
31 Reissued on Duke Ellington, The Complete Duke Ellington, vol. 14 (1939), CBS 88521, two-LP
set, 1981.
32 Ellington’s G-clefs have an extra curl, which make them look a bit like the capital E.
which defy the claim that Ellington consistently used accidentals in the
way suggested by his son. A passage marked “Tutti,” which corresponds
with mm. 70–2 from the recording, shows Ellington canceling a previous
accidental in another voice, to avoid confusion. The autograph for “Never
Felt” is replete with such courtesy accidentals.33 In the entire score, there
is only one ambiguous spot, where Ellington indeed does not cancel
an earlier accidental in another voice (here, the third note for the lead
alto reads B because of the earlier B in the second alto, but it is to
be played as B). However, since this passage consists of chromatically
descending diminished seventh chords it leaves little doubt about how
Ellington intended this passage.
System 2 on the first page shows a new division of voices. The top
staff is now assigned to tenorist Ben Webster, marked “Ten.” The middle
staff, marked “Co” (for cornets; often marked “Cor”), carries a two-part
trumpet line, and the bottom staff – now with a bass clef – is for two
trombones. The division of voices is not difficult to figure out. The soloists
of the top system are not part of the ensemble (the rule of thumb), hence
the voices go to the remaining musicians – in this case Rex Stewart and
Cootie Williams on trumpet, and Lawrence Brown and Joe Nanton on
trombone. The tenor player is Webster, since Bigard is on clarinet.
In the third system, Ellington directs his copyist (Juan Tizol) to an
earlier instrumental score of the piece: “First 6 [bars] of A Cho[ru]s
[and] Transpose to B.” The provenance of this score (titled “- NO – 3 -”)
is unclear, but it is written after December 1939 because it refers to “Ben
[Webster]” who had joined the band on 8 January 1940.34 This A-flat
version is not known to have been recorded at another occasion.35
After the 6-bar insertion, the first chorus continues as written. At the
end, Ellington returns to his A-flat score to set up the modulation from B-
flat to G, for the vocal chorus, via a 4-bar modulatory saxophone section,
marked “E” in the autograph. The baritone here is not written out, but it
needs to double the lead an octave below, which is another rule of thumb.
The connection from B-flat to A-flat is made by a short piano transition
played by Ellington, and this material is obviously not in the score.
33 A similar instance can be found on page 2, system 2, bar 2, which corresponds with m. 48 of
the recording.
34 Luciano Massagli and Giovanni M. Volonté, The New DESOR, vols. 1 and 2, An Updated
Edition of Duke Ellington’s Story on Records, 1924–1974 (Milan: n.p., 1999), 1502.
35 In the New DESOR, Massagli and Volonté list five recordings of “I Never Felt This Way Before”
that are based on two different versions: the instrumental 1939 version and the 1940 vocal
version.
The ensuing vocal chorus – sung by Herb Jeffries, but initially assigned
to Cootie Williams on trumpet – closely follows the score. Notational
short-cuts abound (this time Roman numerals refer to bars that need to
be repeated), but the only issue lies in the final 8-bar tutti, where the score
does not spell out how the four notated voices are to be divided over the
various instrument groups. In Ellington’s scores, the convention is that the
saxophones play the chord as written (with the baritone doubling the lead
in the octave), and that the three trumpets get the top three notes, while
the three trombones play the bottom three. Ellington’s copyists knew that.
A final “Chaser after Vocal” rounds out the piece, which concludes with
a reusage of the last two bars of the earlier tutti section. This tag may
have been added on in rehearsal; the score gives no indication. Clearly, it
takes some prior knowledge to turn this score into playable parts, but it is
not nearly as complicated as suggested by (again) DeVeaux and Giddins,
who maintain that Ellington’s “orchestral parts [recte: scores]” were “a
copyist’s nightmare.”36 Tellingly, apart from the regular copyists who
extracted parts for the orchestra (Juan Tizol, Thomas Whaley, and John
Sanders), dozens of others were occasionally called upon to copy out
Ellington’s scores. Apparently, these copyists had no difficulty deciphering
the “nightmare,” since they provided perfectly readable and playable parts.
Their autograph manuscripts, too, can be found in the Duke Ellington
Collection.
Notation thus allowed Ellington to compose more complex – and, at
times, longer – works. It is hard to know how much Ellington relied on
notation in the first decade of his work with the orchestra. (The Duke
Ellington Collection does not document this early period well, although
some so far unidentified works for what might be the a late-1920s version
of the band have survived, under mysterious titles such as “Bottle.”37 As
the orchestra grew in size, Ellington increasingly worked out the music
in advance. That practice can be illustrated with Reminiscing in Tempo
(recorded 12 September 1935), for which a complete and detailed 16-page
score on standard music manuscript paper in his hand exists.38 Ellington
actually refers to this score in his autobiography: “After I lost my beautiful
mother, I found mental isolation to reflect on the past . . . I wrote music,
36 DeVeaux and Giddins, Jazz, 212. 37 Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1, Box 61, folder 13.
38 The autograph suggests that it was written over a longer period, since the different sections
match with different brands of paper (Standard Brand for Reminiscing in Tempo, parts 1 and 2,
MM 10 staves for Reminiscing in Tempo, part 3, and King Brand for the final part). For a
detailed analysis of Reminiscing in Tempo and the provenance of these autographs, see
Howland, Uptown, 171–6.
and it came out as Reminiscing in Tempo . . . Every page of that particular

manuscript was dotted with smears and unshapely marks caused by tears
that had fallen.”39 It is important to note that Ellington connects his grief
over the passing of his mother to actually writing the music (rather than
performing it, or making the recording).
Reminiscing in Tempo runs close to thirteen minutes of music (at the
time, recorded on two double-sided 78-rpm discs). The recording closely
follows the score, which carries all the hallmarks of Ellingtonian compo-
sition. Solo parts or individual notes may be given to specific musicians:
“Cooty” (Williams), “Rab” (Johnny Hodges), “Otto” (Hardwick), (Juan)
“Tizol,” “Tricky” (Joe Nanton), and (Lawrence) “Brown.” Elsewhere, he
specifies how a four-part tutti-section is to be distributed over the various
voices. Part of the compositional process becomes apparent here too. On
the second page of the manuscript, Ellington instructs his copyist to go to
a sheet marked “X” for a 10-bar insertion. Such reshuffling occurs again
later, when Ellington notes to “Inject Part 4,” which is a section marked
“K.” To avoid confusion, he has numbered the bars afterwards. In the
final part, the copyist has to “Leave two (2.) lines,” for a passage that was
filled out on the recording by Ellington’s piano. Again, copyist Juan Tizol
must have had little difficulty putting the instrumental parts in order. It
is important to note that in this case Ellington did all this structuring and
restructuring on paper, prior to the recording. No further reorganizations
were made in the recording studio.
Reminiscing in Tempo demonstrates how Ellington composed the work
in stages. Going over what he had written, he decided that a specific section
needed additional material, and consequently he made an insertion. It
now becomes clear that notation did not serve merely to capture his
ideas. Rather, as Nicholas Cook has observed, notation is a “culture of
visible symbols, an esoteric form of literature . . . [and] a stylized way of
picturing sound patterns . . . Music [on paper] is able to circulate as an
intelligible text.”40 As intelligible text, Ellington’s scores talked back to
him and helped him to shape his music, adding layers as he went along –
at times restructuring sections, revisiting others, or using earlier material
that he had kept on hand for later use.
Once the score was extracted into parts, it had served its goal. There
was no need to go back to it to make corrections, adjustments, or edits,
39 Ellington, Mistress, 86. The score is actually quite clean and readable (DEC, Series 1, box 305,
folders 1–5).
40 Cook, “Making Music Together,” 6–7.
particularly since the score was not intended for publication. With the
instrumental parts in front of his band members, Ellington would try
out the music in rehearsal, and usually make edits. The rhythm section
would work out its parts, and Ellington would add piano introductions,
interludes, or codas. Therefore, more often than not, recordings differ
from the surviving written music, but the differences mostly pertain to
the order of material. Musicians who newly entered the band could be
confused by the performance practices of the organization. For instance,
when recalling his early days with the orchestra in 1944, tenorist Al Sears
noted:
Really, you’ve got no idea what it’s like till you’ve actually tried playing in the band.
You start at the letter A and go to B and suddenly, for no reason at all, when you
go to C, the rest of the band is playing something else, which you find out later on
isn’t what is written at C but what’s written at J instead. And then the next number,
instead of starting at the top, the entire band starts at H – that is, everybody except
me. See, I’m the newest man in the band and I haven’t caught on to the system yet!41
But – as hundreds of fully coherent recordings by the orchestra show –

before long, most newcomers managed to indeed catch on to the “system.”
The notational detail in this and every other Ellington score shows
that the musicians in the band could read music well. Proficiency in
reading may have varied, however. Nevertheless, a player like Juan Tizol –
who during his first stay with the band copied out the larger share of
Ellington’s scores – had great music reading skills, and fellow trombonist
Britt Woodman “reported that in the 1950s Tizol had devilishly difficult
sight-reading exercises on which he liked to test the new members of the
band.”42 As the orchestra grew, notation became more important, and
consequently the band members had to read more and become better
readers. While in the early days of the orchestra, Ellington may have
taught the musicians their individual parts one by one,43 this practice
disappeared altogether in the 1930s. In the postwar LP era, more than
once, the orchestra recorded scores that were only performed at a specific
recording session, to be shelved afterwards. This practice called for expert
sight readers.
41 Nicholson, Reminiscing, 260.

42 Kurt Dietrich, Duke’s Bones: Ellington’s Great Trombonists (Rottenburg: Advance Music, 1995),
53–4.
43 This practice does not exclude the possibility that Ellington himself had notated music in front
of him.
As stated, Ellington would finalize his compositions in rehearsal. This

was a process of editing and re-editing, which mostly meant that he would
reorganize the order of various segments – or at times insert sections
written afterwards. This sort of bandstand editing would happen in other
significant ways as well. “Ellington plays the piano,” Strayhorn wrote,
“but his real instrument is his band. Each member of his band is to
him a distinctive tone color and set of emotions, which he mixes with
others equally distinctive to produce a third thing, which I like to call
the Ellington Effect.” As he further explained: “Sometimes this mixing
happens on paper and frequently right on the bandstand. I have often
seen him exchange parts in the middle of a piece because the man and the
part weren’t the same character.”44 In sum, regardless of whether he was
inserting sections, instructing the band to play their parts in a different
order, or even exchanging parts, Ellington’s methodology relied heavily
on notation. It was a conscious and deliberate process.
As is readily apparent from the materials in the Duke Ellington Col-
lection, in writing down his music, from sketches to full compositions,
Ellington kept them on hand for future use. The aforementioned Rem-
iniscing in Tempo is a case in point. After its 1935 recording, Ellington
revisited the score in 1945 (the 21 July broadcast performance for ABC
was part of the Your Saturday Date with the Duke show). For this, Ellington
reassigned voices to his now larger band, and added parts to his autograph.
The score refers to Cooty (for trumpeter Cootie Williams) and Sears (for
tenorist Al Sears) – two musicians who never played together in the band.45
In other instances, he could go back to music that for some reason had
not been used, as exemplified by the inserted segments in “I Never Felt
This Way Before.” The surviving scores for the 1941 theater production,
Jump for Joy, or the 1951 soundtrack for the film Anatomy of a Mur-
der similarly show how Ellington went back and forth between blocks of
music.46
At various points across his career, Ellington would convey the impres-
sion that he was notoriously careless about conserving his legacy for
posterity. For example, he once said: “We hardly ever keep scores. We have
44 Billy Strayhorn, “The Ellington Effect,” Down Beat, 5 November 1952, 2; reprinted in Tucker,
Reader, 269–70, emphasis added.
45 Williams’s first stay with the band ended November 1940, while Sears joined in mid-1944.
Sears left in January 1949, and Williams returned in September 1962.
46 In both cases, Strayhorn’s contributions were added to the mix as well – which is another
example of how notation was essential to the working methods of Ellington. These extended
works are not only a copyist’s, but also an archivist’s nightmare.
nothing to go back to. Out of the thousands of numbers we’ve done, only
about ten percent of the scores remain. They disappear. People wrap their
lunches in them.”47 Likewise, he maintained in his autobiography Music
Is My Mistress that he had “no interest in posterity,”48 and his disinter-
est in the leather-bound volumes presented at his sixtieth birthday could
serve as case in point. On this, Strayhorn recounted that Ellington “really
doesn’t care about this sort of thing you know – collecting his stuff. To
him it doesn’t matter at all. Not too long ago, for his [sixtieth] birthday,
we thought it would be a good idea to collect all [of] Duke’s work together
and present it to him . . . It ran to several leather-bound volumes. Now it’s
in a warehouse.”49
Despite such impressions, Ellington knew that his band’s materials
were safeguarded. Tom Whaley (1892–1986), a pianist and accomplished
orchestrator, was trusted with the library and kept it in shape. Whaley was
in fact the unofficial “head librarian” from 1941 through to his retirement
in 1968. He replaced worn parts with new ones, reconstructed scores from
existent parts, added titles and band book numbers to parts, etc. Whenever
Ellington needed to revisit a score, or whenever the band needed new or
additional parts, they quickly showed up.
When the music materials that eventually would form the Duke Elling-
ton Collection came to the Smithsonian Institution in 1988 they were in
disarray, but these papers showed obvious signs that they had once been
organized. Ellington archivist Annie Kuebler (who worked for thirteen
years in the Duke Ellington Collection) believes that “Ellington could
afford such a casual public stance [about his scores] because he was well
aware that Tom Whaley was behind the scenes documenting Ellington’s
role in twentieth-century American music.”50 There are other signs that
the bandleader was less indifferent about posterity. From the 1950s, he
tended to record his compositions at his own cost. Many of these so-called
“stockpile” sessions were first issued after his death. In addition, while
he was in the hospital during his terminal illness, Ellington continued to
work on the comic opera Queenie Pie, though he knew he would never
see its performance. (The unfinished opera was completed by others, and
premiered after his death.)
47 Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 20.
49 Jewell, Duke, 20. See also Irving Townsend, “Ellington in Private,” The Atlantic Monthly, May
1975, 78–83.
50 Annie Kuebler, “Tom Whaley: Footnotes and Whole Notes in Jazz History,” Newsletter of the
Duke Ellington Society, Chapter 90 (December 1996), 2.
Ellington’s nonchalant posture may have been part of the cool image
he cultivated, but it may also have been a way to overcome his demons.
He was a known hypochondriac and did not like to be reminded of his
own mortality.51 To some extent, the leather-bound presentation albums
so loyally compiled by his colleagues (Strayhorn, band member John
Sanders, and his physician Arthur Logan) did just that: the hundreds of
pieces that documented a life in music must have hammered home to the
Ellington that he was moving past his middle age. At any rate, there is no
way of knowing what moved him to disregard the gesture of his friends.
He may have felt that his music could not be truly represented by such
notated lead sheets, he may have not liked that it reminded him of his
progressing age, or he may have been interested in the future rather than
the past (“Q. Which of all your tunes is your favorite? A. The next one.
The one I’m writing tonight or tomorrow, the new baby is always the
favorite.”52 ).
As this chapter makes quite clear, notation played an essential role
in Ellington’s work. Notated music served at least five different, related
purposes: it was an essential part of his compositional strategies; it enabled
quick and efficient communication with his band; it was prerequisite
at rehearsals and performances; it allowed him to build on his earlier
music; and it was safeguarded for posterity. Notation never was a goal for
Ellington, but a tool, and a crucially important one at that.
Ellington’s autographs reveal how notation helped him to shape his
ideas. Working on paper allowed him to capture and store his ideas and
to develop them into much larger and more complex textures, sounds,
and structures. It allowed him to structure and organize his music. The
rich detail in Ellington’s music – his complex harmonies, the sophisticated
structural design, the ever-changing cross-section instrumentations, the
on-the-man writing – could not be achieved without notation. By work-
ing in a written medium, Ellington – like any other composer who uses
notation – engaged in dialog with the written musical text.
Notation was a vital means of communication between Ellington and
his copyists, and through the instrumental parts they created, with his
orchestra. Ellington’s music was too intricate to work out from scratch
on the bandstand. If in the early days of his career he may have resorted
to teaching his musicians their parts individually, this was no longer an
option from the 1930s forward. (Even prior to this shift, Ellington may
have had written music in front of him while instructing the band.) At
51 See Hajdu, Lush, passim. 52 Ellington, Mistress, 463.

times, the communication with his collaborators also occurred through

scores, as mail envelopes in both the Duke Ellington Collection and the
Billy Strayhorn Collection attest.
Once the parts were handed out to his band, Ellington’s composing
entered another phase. In rehearsal with his orchestra, he would finalize
the work at hand, albeit often for the moment, since the same score
could later lead to another version. Typically, he would change the order
indicated by the parts. At times he inserted music from other sources.
Sometimes such inserts were written and copied out on the spot. These
were the reworkings that could confuse new band members, who had
to figure out in which order a particular part had to be played. Their
stories have led to all kinds of mystifications. Musical form often relied
on non-written information, as did the rhythm section parts. Bassist John
Lamb told me that playing without parts could be tough, especially if
Ellington left the piano in the middle of a piece to conduct the band.53
In rehearsal, as recounted previously in the words of Strayhorn, Ellington
might even exchange musicians’ parts. Again, such maneuvers called for
written media.
It should come as no surprise that many scores and parts have disap-
peared from the library of a band that was on the road for close to half
a century. Hundreds of different musicians came through the orchestra,
and the organization could be in a New York recording studio one day,
only to find itself embarking on an international tour the next day. Still, an
impressive amount of material has survived thanks to people like Thomas
Whaley, who cared for the music.
Duke Ellington knew his music was highly regarded by many. Despite
his supposed indifference about what would happen to it after his passing,
he may have expected that his music would outlive him. When he died,
his otherwise modest worldly possessions included a stockpile of unissued
recorded works, an unfinished opera he hoped would still see completion,
and an extensive collection of autograph scores and parts in a rented
Manhattan warehouse. Apparently, not too many people were allowed to
wrap their lunches in Ellington’s scores.
In sum, music notation was an integral part of Ellington’s composing.
His music is simply unthinkable without it.
53 John Lamb, personal conversation with the author at the Ellington Reunion Project, the
American Jazz Institute, Claremont McKenna College, 8 February 2004.
6 The Moor’s Revenge: The Politics of Such Sweet
Thunder
david schiff
More than a half-century since its premiere Such Sweet Thunder stands as
one of the greatest achievements of the Ellington/Strayhorn collaboration,
and yet its title remains a provocative mystery.1 The three words come from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, scene 1:
theseus: Go, one of you, find out the forester;
For now our observation is perform’d;
And since we have the vaward of the day,
My love shall hear the music of my hounds.
Uncouple in the western valley; let them go:
Dispatch, I say, and find the forester.
[Exit an Attendant]
We will, fair queen, up to the mountain’s top,
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.
hippolyta: I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bay’d the bear
With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear
Such gallant chiding: for, besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem’d all one mutual cry: I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
The musical sounds figured in Shakespeare’s text are the cry of hounds on
the hunt, echoing throughout the landscape. In appropriating “such sweet
thunder” as a title for both a single movement and the entire Shakespearean
suite, Ellington dared listeners to hear the music and its far-reaching
echoes in conjunction – and perhaps also let us know that the music
had both fangs and claws. At the same time, though, he sowed more
than a little “musical confusion” by skewing the Bard’s words to his own
purposes in a series of displacements beginning by transferring the title
1 This is a revised version of a paper given at the annual meeting of the American Musicological
Society, Indianapolis, 5 November 2010. Some of the content of this chapter appears in different
form in my book, The Ellington Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 177
178 david schiff
words themselves from the comic world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

to the tragedy of Othello, a move that announces, with King Lear, the
music’s “darker purpose,” and then portraying the Moor of Venice with
a brash blues-infused stride that instantly evokes his powerful physical
presence and African origins. While the political echoes of the opening
motto seem clear today, reception history shows that early critics praised
the music without drawing out the political implications; in the New
York Times, John S. Wilson called the piece “provocative” but limited the
scope of that term to the ways that the music reimagined Shakespeare’s
characters.2 Less friendly critics have cast doubts on its authors’ grasp
(or even right to grasp) of the greatest figure in English literature. James
Lincoln Collier, for instance, later dismissed most of the suite as “self-
indulgent fragments that are tied to Shakespeare by great leaps of logic and
that show very little understanding of what the plays are actually about.”3
To understand both Ellington’s calculated strategies of appropriation and
displacement and also the apparent tone-deafness of much of the criticism
to the music’s wider echoes, we need to look at the particular way that jazz
and Shakespeare functioned in American society in the Cold War decade
of the 1950s.
In the years after World War II, the political and artistic cultures of the
United States changed direction sharply. As the U.S.S.R. suddenly mor-
phed from ally to enemy, Congress launched an anti-communist campaign
that peaked in the early 1950s with the hearings of the House Un-American
Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Committee chaired
by Senator Joseph McCarthy. These hearings were staged to expose com-
munist influence in all areas of American life from the army to the arts. At
the same time, the world of popular music witnessed a sudden and unex-
pected reconfiguration. Soon after the war’s end, many of the big bands
whose music had attained anthem-like status during the war broke up. The
big band era quickly passed into history, and by the early 1950s, singers
like Patti Page and Nat King Cole topped the charts, not bands. By 1952,
two years before rhythm and blues crossed over as rock ’n’ roll, Down
Beat magazine reported that only the bands of Duke Ellington, Count
Basie, Woody Herman, and Stan Kenton were still in business. Although
these two phenomena may appear unrelated, they can help illuminate
Ellington’s creative strategies at the time.
2 John S. Wilson, “Jazz: Ellington; ‘Duke’ Bounces Back with Provocative Work,” New York Times,
13 October 1957.
3 James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 285.
The Moor’s Revenge 179
During the 1940s, Ellington had presented a series of strongly political

works outside the usual jazz venues. These efforts included the musical
review Jump for Joy, the extended “tone parallel” to African American
history, Black, Brown and Beige, and its three sequels, New World a-Comin’,
the Deep South Suite, and A Tone Parallel to Harlem. Black, Brown and
Beige premiered at Carnegie Hall in January 1943 at a highly publicized
benefit concert for Russian war relief. This work placed Ellington and his
music at the center of Popular Front politics (the alliance of left-leaning
organizations, including the Communist Party) in the fight both against
fascism and for workers’ rights and civil rights. While most of Black, Brown
and Beige was a musical narrative about the African American past, its
three sequels – premiered at Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera
House – dealt with contemporary issues: the hope for full civil rights,
the persistence of racism, and the myths and realities of the country’s
largest African American community. Despite the prestigious concert hall
setting for the premieres of these works, or perhaps because of it, they
encountered a surprising amount of resistance from professional (and
white) jazz critics who accused Ellington of “losing contact with the basic
fundamentals of jazz,”4 while barely mentioning the political content of
the music, even when it was spelled out in program notes.
In the music world, the Popular Front may be said to have ended
with two traumatic events of 1949: the Cultural and Scientific Confer-
ence for World Peace held at the Waldorf Astoria in March, and the
August anti-communist riots in Peekskill, New York, which followed a
concert given by Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie. The conference –
attended by, among others, Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Leonard
Bernstein – was portrayed as a Commintern initiative in the American
press even before Nicholas Nabokov (composer and CIA operative) baited
Dmitri Shostakovich into saying that he fully agreed with the denuncia-
tions of Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky printed
in Pravda. The statement was a gift to the anti-communist movement.
A month later, Life magazine ran a two-page spread on the conference
denouncing both the Kremlin and its American dupes, which in their
opinion included Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Langston Hughes.5
The Peekskill riot – in truth, a well-organized act of terror – was pro-
voked by comments that the Associated Press had attributed erroneously
to Paul Robeson:
4 Bob Thiele, “The Case of Jazz Music” (1943), reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 176.
5 Francis Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War (New York: New Press, 1999), 52.
180 david schiff
We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and
are determined to share its wealth. We denounce the policy of the United States
government, which is similar to that of Hitler and Goebbels . . . It is unthinkable
that American Negroes would go to war against a country [the Soviet Union] which
in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.6
As Robeson’s biographer Martin Duberman wrote, even had the

activist/singer actually spoken these words, they would not have been
out of line with those of other prominent black leaders (such as A. Phillip
Randolph). Nor would this statement have been entirely alien to much
of the social critique found in the unpublished script that Ellington had
written for Black, Brown and Beige.7
The Peekskill riot illustrates how the anti-communist purge was also
an attack on the Civil Rights movement. As Ellen Schrecker has writ-
ten, the Civil Rights leaders of the 1940s pursued both domestic and
international concerns. Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois linked “their strug-
gle for racial equality to that of Africans and other colonized peoples
for national liberation.”8 But, as Schrecker observes, the anti-communist
purge “destroyed Robeson’s career, reputation and health, while the elderly
Du Bois was first marginalized and then fired by the NAACP, the orga-
nization that he himself had founded.”9 When HUAC summoned Jackie
Robinson to denounce Robeson at its public hearings, he bravely began
his testimony by saying “the fact that it is a Communist who denounces
injustice in the courts, police brutality, and lynching when it happens
doesn’t change the truth of his charges.”10 The relentless pressures of the
anti-communist movement led many Civil Rights organizations to drop
any vestige of anti-colonial language, and drove a wedge been labor unions
and the Civil Rights movement, each movement trying to disconnect from
its older communist alliances, but in different ways.
Given this history, it is hardly surprising that Ellington’s politically
inspired music seemed to come to a halt with Harlem, or that Ellington’s
music was also marginalized from Carnegie Hall to the Aquacade at Flush-
ing Meadows where the band performed in the summer of 1955. The ads
for the latter show literally surrounded Ellington’s name with promises
of “dancing waters, ice show and water show.”11 As cultural symbolism,
6 Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: Ballantine, 1989), 342.
7 See, for example, the various extended passages reprinted in Cohen, America, 216–17.
8 Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton: Princeton
9 Ibid. 10 Duberman, Paul Robeson, 360. 11 Vail, Diary, Part 2, 81.
playing the Aquacade, we might say, was like being exiled to Siberia. The
politically engaged audiences Ellington had drawn to Carnegie Hall were
now intimidated by the strategies of red-baiting and black-listing of the
anti-communist movement.
From the low point of the early 1950s, the Civil Rights movement,
the American left, and Duke Ellington all had to reinvent themselves to
survive in an environment where any hint of communist influence might
unleash the machinery of the blacklist. A new political model emerged
in 1957 with the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Council
(SCLC). It developed in the wake of the Montgomery Alabama bus boycott
under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King. In his 4 June 1957 speech,
“The Power of Non-Violence,” King replaced Marxist arguments for social
change with Christian ones: “Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive
good will for all men. Biblical theologians would say it is the love of God
working in the minds of men . . . It is the type of love that stands at the
center of the movement that we are trying to carry on in the Southland –
agape.”12 Several years before Ellington and King actually met (in 1963),
Ellington affirmed King’s spiritual approach in the version of Black, Brown
and Beige that was recorded in February 1958, with Mahalia Jackson
singing lyrics for the previously instrumental “Come Sunday”: “Lord,
dear Lord above, God almighty, God of love, Please look down and see my
people through.” For this album, Ellington composed a new setting of the
Twenty-Third Psalm to replace the older Beige movement. While Ellington
would pursue this religious/political fusion explicitly in the 1960s with My
People (which contained the song “King Fit the Battle of Alabam”) and
the Concerts of Sacred Music, for his major compositional projects of
1957 – the fanciful retelling of jazz history in A Drum Is a Woman and
the equally fanciful retelling of Shakespeare in Such Sweet Thunder – he
chose to explore themes which seemed, at least on the surface, free of both
religious content and political relevance.
Such Sweet Thunder, however, turned out to be both timely and political
in spite of its Shakespearean trappings; it was Shakespeare ripped from
the headlines. The thrust of the Civil Rights movement in 1957 was the
integration of schools and other public facilities in the face of mounting
resistance to court-ordered desegregation by Southern whites. The strug-
gle for integration emerged as a national crisis in September 1957 with the
confrontation of federal soldiers, Governor Faubus, and state troopers at
12 Martin Luther King, “The Power of Nonviolence,” [published on] 1 May 1958, www
.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/power-nonviolence# (accessed 24 July 2015).
182 david schiff
Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The issue of integration also
surfaced that year in parts of the musical world not usually associated with
political activism. Integration – and love – are central to three of the most
important cultural productions of 1957: Such Sweet Thunder, music by
Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (28 April); the musical West Side Story,
music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (opening, 26
September); and the ballet Agon, music by Igor Stravinsky, choreography
by George Balanchine (premiere, 1 December). In confronting the con-
tinuing and escalating instances of racist injustice, all three works revived
aspects of the Cultural Front (to borrow Michael Denning’s term13 ), but
wrapped their politics in several layers of anti-anti-communist armor.
For instance, West Side Story cushioned its Blitzstein-inspired radicalism
both within the framework of the more politically acceptable, psycho-
logically driven form of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and also
by dressing its story in the leather garments of juvenile delinquency, a
problem that was framed at the time as a matter of social maladjustment,
not political protest. (In its most caustically political moment, the show
torpedoed the prevalent idea of “social disease” with the song “Officer
Krupke.”)
Agon presented itself as an apolitical, abstract, plotless dance contest
that just happened to contain, at its core, an erotic interracial pas de deux
for the white Diana Adams and the black Arthur Mitchell. However, in this
political climate, abstraction could serve as a political tactic just because
it appeared to be non-political. (Advocates for the two vanguard styles
of the time – abstract expressionism in painting and serialism in music –
framed them as aesthetic movements devoid of political agendas.) Critics
hailed the Stravinsky/Balanchine ballet Agon, which premiered six months
after Such Sweet Thunder, as a plotless work of pure dance set to a 12-
tone score, but as Edwin Denby wrote, the male dancer in the Sarabande
suggested “a New York Latin in a leather jacket”14 and Stravinsky had
found ways of bending serialism to evoke contemporary jazz. The ballet
brought the musical idiom of Schoenberg and Webern into the mean
streets of New York; the City Center, where Agon premiered, was just a few
blocks from the West Side turf of the Jets and Sharks. West Side Story had
opened a few months before Agon, and Denby recognized the clear link
13 Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth
Century (London: Verso, 1997).
14 Edwin Denby, “The Three Sides of Agon,” in Dancers, Buildings and People in the Street (New
York: Popular Library, 1965), 110.
between Balanchine’s abstract, elite eroticism and the more vernacular

jazz-inspired style of Jerome Robbins’s choreography (for instance, in the
show’s “Dance at the Gym” scene).
While Denby reverted to notions of apolitical abstraction in claiming
that the mixed-race casting of the pas de deux (for Diana Adams and
Arthur Mitchell) was “neither stressed nor hidden,” he observed that
this casting “adds to the interest.”15 Melissa Hayden (who also danced in
Agon) saw things differently: “The first time you saw Diana Adams and
Arthur Mitchell doing the pas de deux it was really awesome to see a
black hand touch a white skin. That’s where we were coming from in the
fifties.”16 That said, abstraction danced around censorship and racism.
Had Balanchine titled his ballet “Romeo and Juliet,” an interracial pas
de deux might have caused some outrage. Even in West Side Story, which
depicted inter-ethnic romance explicitly, Maria – whether played by Carol
Lawrence on stage or Natalie Wood on screen – was the whitest Puerto
Rican in the neighborhood.
The Stratford Shakespearian Festival
During the Cold War era, Shakespearean productions often served as an

outlet for political protest. As Lawrence Levine reminded us in High-
brow/Lowbrow, Shakespeare had long been as American as apple pie.17
The 1950s witnessed a boom in Shakespeare festivals that paralleled the
newly arrived venues of the summer jazz festival. The Stratford (Ontario)
Shakespearian Festival, directed by Tyrone Guthrie, began in 1953. Joseph
Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1954, and the Amer-
ican Shakespeare Festival opened in Stratford, Connecticut, in 1955. In
the USA, politically inspired productions revived the interpretive strate-
gies from the 1930s, as exemplified by Orson Welles’s all-black “voodoo”
Macbeth for the Federal Theater Project in 1936.
Joseph Papp, once a Communist party member, first hatched the idea
of presenting Shakespeare without an admission charge in 1953; his plans
15 Ibid., 112.
16 Charles M. Joseph, Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention (New Haven: Yale
17 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
184 david schiff
evolved into Shakespeare in the Park while he was tailed by the FBI and
ordered to testify before HUAC. He later recalled the period:
The fifties . . . looked like the end of the world with no light at the end of the
tunnel. People forced to choose between informing on other people or saving
themselves, people scared into silence. People stopped writing. Some of those who
were blacklisted tried to clear their names, some committed suicide, some were
unemployed for years.18
When Papp was subpoenaed by the HUAC in 1958, he was asked whether
he injected Communist philosophy into his Shakespeare productions.
Papp responded:
Sir, the plays we do are Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare said: “To thine own self be
true,” and various other lines from Shakespeare can hardly be said to be “subversive”
or “influencing minds.” I cannot control the writings of Shakespeare. He wrote five
hundred years ago. I am in no position in any plays where I work to influence
what the final product will be, except artistically and except in terms of my job as a
producer.19
By linking Shakespeare’s uncontroversial canonic standing and his own

prerogatives as an artist, Papp demonstrated the way Shakespeare could
serve as a shield for political protest in the 1950s – whether at Shakespeare
in the Park, or in Such Sweet Thunder, or West Side Story. Without changing
a word of the text, Papp made Shakespeare feel current a decade before Jan
Kott’s book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, appeared.20 His productions
used American actors speaking in their own voices rather than affecting
British speech. He sought “blood-and-guts actors”21 and integrated, eth-
nically diverse casts. His actors worked in the visceral modern style (most
familiar from the film performances of Marlon Brando and James Dean)
influenced by what was called The Method. Among them were Roscoe Lee
Browne, Colleen Dewhurst, James Earl Jones, and George C. Scott. They
made Shakespeare sound as relevant to the 1950s as Clifford Odets’s plays
had been to the 1930s.
With the simultaneous boom in jazz festivals and Shakespeare festivals,
the time seemed ripe for linking jazz and the Bard. On his 1955 Omnibus
television show, “The World of Jazz” (aired on 16 October), Leonard
Bernstein – who shared Papp’s left-wing background and was already
working on West Side Story – demonstrated that the blues was a poetic
18 Quoted in Helen Epstein, Joe Papp: An American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), 124.
19 Ibid., 127. 20 Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: Norton, 1974).
21 Epstein, Joe Papp, 167.
form by singing a blues to lines from Macbeth: “I will not be afraid of death
and bane / Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.” In this same cultural
direction, less than a fortnight after its Newport Festival “rebirth” on 8 July
1956, the Ellington orchestra played two concerts for the Shakespearean
Festival in Stratford, Ontario, along with Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz
Quartet, and the Art Tatum Trio. According to David Hajdu’s detailed
account, the Festival had hoped for a major new work from Ellington,
but not surprisingly he arrived with the same program he had played at
Newport. After the Stratford performances, two members of the Festival
staff – Louis Applebaum and Barbara Reed – asked Ellington to compose
something unusual and Shakespearean for Stratford. Ellington proposed
the suite form, and, according to Hajdu, “Strayhorn took it on excitedly,
glowing to his friends about having an Ellington Orchestra project geared
especially to him.” Strayhorn’s knowledge of the Bard had already earned
him the nickname “Shakespeare.”22
Strayhorn’s oft-quoted statement that he and Ellington read through
all of Shakespeare does not quite comport with the apparent authorship
of the suite. The manuscript sketches in the Duke Ellington Collection of
the Smithsonian show that Ellington composed all but three of the move-
ments, though several of these contain phrases by Strayhorn, while two
of Strayhorn’s compositions were composed before the Shakespeare
project was hatched. The manuscripts, however, do not necessarily raise
doubts about Strayhorn’s involvement, but suggest instead that there may
well have been considerable verbal collaboration not apparent on the page.
(We know from other evidence, for example, that Ellington and Strayhorn
did much of their work over the phone.)
Such Sweet Thunder, a suite in twelve movements composed by Elling-
ton and Strayhorn for the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario,
was in fact premiered at a Music for Moderns concert (titled “Twelve-tone
to Ellingtonia”) at New York’s Town Hall on 28 April 1957, a day before
Ellington’s fifty-eighth birthday; the band played the suite again at Strat-
ford on 5 September. At Town Hall, the curtain raiser was Kurt Weill’s early,
astringent Violin Concerto, Op. 12, played by Anahid Ajemian and mem-
bers of the New York Philharmonic under Dmitri Mitropoulos. (Weill’s
music was enjoying a posthumous boom thanks to the revival of The
Threepenny Opera in Marc Blitzstein’s English translation, but his con-
certo gave only a foretaste of the jazz-influenced Weill.) The New York
Times critic, Ross Parmenter, found the new Ellington/Strayhorn work far
22 Hajdu, Lush, 155.

186 david schiff
more persuasive than Weill’s concerto and “thoroughly winning.” Most

jazz critics and historians have since considered the suite a high point of
the Ellington band’s repertory. As Harvey Cohen has written, the suite
demonstrated that “black artists were not ghettoized in purely black cate-
gories and were free to roam anywhere in the musical universe.”23 Sharing
the bill with a classical concerto work in a classical venue, Such Sweet
Thunder beat out the competition on its own terms, without resorting to
the devices of crossover.
The successful premiere of Such Sweet Thunder came less than a year
after the band’s triumphant July 1956 “rebirth” at the Newport Jazz Festi-
val, and Ellington in turn appeared on the 19 August 1956 cover of Time
and won a new contract with Columbia Records. He was on a roll across
period media. On 15 March 1957, he appeared, with his sister Ruth and
son Mercer, on Edward R. Morrow’s television program, Person to Person.
Ellington’s musical-theater fantasy of jazz history, A Drum Is a Woman,
aired on the U.S. Steel Hour on CBS-TV a week after the Such Sweet
Thunder premiere. Six weeks later, the band recorded The Duke Ellington
Songbook album with Ella Fitzgerald. Still later that summer, the band
played the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, the summer home of the Chicago
Symphony, then in its Fritz Reiner heyday.
Suddenly surrounded by honors from the white cultural world, Elling-
ton had good reason to liken himself to the original black superstar:
Othello. Although the title phrase “Such Sweet Thunder” came from a
line in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“I never heard so musical a dis-
cord, such sweet thunder”), Ellington’s program notes described the title
movement of the suite as
the sweet and singing, very convincing story Othello told Desdemona. It must have
been the most because when her father complained and tried to have the marriage
annulled, the Duke of Venice said that if Othello had said this to his daughter, she
would have gone for it too.24
It should be noted here that Othello was a role strongly associated with
Paul Robeson, who had played the character against such prominent white
Desdemonas as Peggy Ashcroft and Uta Hagen. Ellington’s choice for the
lead character in the musical suite therefore had inescapable political (and
sexual) resonances.
Many of the instrumental parts for this title piece bear a different title,
“Cleo,” which suggests that the supposed tone parallel for a Moorish
23 Cohen, America, 335.

24 From Irving Townsend’s original liner notes to Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Such Sweet
Thunder, Columbia CL 1033, 1957, LP.
general had in fact been conceived to portray an Egyptian Queen. Some-

where along the line, the musical subject had changed genders while
retaining an African setting and protagonist; either character, however,
aimed the music squarely at the core anxiety of American racism – sex
between the races – a theme Ellington had explored previously in the
Deep South Suite. In Music Is My Mistress, Ellington wrote that “Nobody
Was Looking” (from the Deep South Suite) “illustrated the theory that,
when nobody was looking, many people of different extractions are able
to get along together.” He described the movement as a parable about
a puppy and a flower following their “natural tendencies.”25 A decade
after this work, Ellington, shielded by the Bard, presented an even bolder
parable about interracial sex, an act which was still illegal in many Amer-
ican states both north and south. (The Supreme Court did not declare
anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional until 1967; sixteen states still
had such laws in 1957.)
The following is a list of the movements of the suite with their Shake-
spearean parallels (as given on the original album liner notes) and main
soloists:
1. “Such Sweet Thunder” (Othello, though the title comes from A Mid-
summer Night’s Dream), solo: Ray Nance.
2. “Sonnet for Caesar” (Julius Caesar), solo: Jimmy Hamilton.
3. “Sonnet to Hank Cinq” (Henry V), solo: Britt Woodman.
4. “Lady Mac” (Macbeth), solo: Clark Terry (the solo may have been
written by Strayhorn).
5. “Sonnet in Search of a Moor” (Othello again, but note the pun in the
title), solo: Jimmy Woode.
6. “The Telecasters” (the witches from Macbeth meet Iago from Othello),
solo: Harry Carney.
7. “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down)” (A
Midsummer Night’s Dream), solos: Jimmy Hamilton, Ray Nance (vio-
lin), Russell Procope, Paul Gonsalves, Johnny Hodges, John Sanders,
and Clark Terry. Written by Billy Strayhorn and originally titled
“Puck.”
8. “Sonnet for Sister Kate” (The Taming of the Shrew), solo: Quentin
Jackson.
9. “The Star-Crossed Lovers” (Romeo and Juliet), solo: Johnny Hodges.
Based on an earlier Strayhorn song, “Pretty Girl.”
10. “Madness in Great Ones” (Hamlet), solo: Cat Anderson.

188 david schiff
11. “Half the Fun” (Antony and Cleopatra), solo: Johnny Hodges. Based
on an earlier Strayhorn song, “Lately.”
12. “Circle of Fourths” (the four Shakespearian genres: tragedy, comedy,
history, and sonnet), solo: Paul Gonsalves.
Ellington’s approach to Shakespeare was radically revisionist – today we

might even term it “post-colonial” on a number of levels. Stylistically, the
music was contemporary American, not Elizabethan English. Paralleling
Papp’s approach at Shakespeare in the Park, Ellington and Strayhorn pre-
sented a contemporary Shakespeare shorn of period trappings. They made
their stance clear in the very first bar when the trombones announce Oth-
ello’s presence with a habanera-rock groove that sounds like Fats Domino
not John Dowland. The music was also provocatively modern, not com-
fortably retro. Except for “The Star-Crossed Lovers,” a typical Hodges
ballad, and “Circle of Fourths,” a romp based on the harmonic changes
of “How High the Moon,” the movements were boldly innovative even
in relation to the Ellington and Strayhorn oeuvres. Strayhorn’s “Up and
Down, Up and Down” and Ellington’s “Madness in Great Ones” pushed
jazz far beyond its usual forms and harmonies, right to the brink of free
jazz. The suite radically re-envisioned Shakespearean familiar characters,
revealing their flip side. Lady Macbeth appears as a hip chick like Eartha
Kitt, rather than a cold-blooded monster; while Hamlet is refigured in
the image of Ellington’s screech trumpeter, Cat Anderson, rather than the
familiar blond-wigged Dane of Lawrence Olivier.
But the suite shows its post-colonial essence most clearly by giving voice
to the Other, whether the Other is racial or sexual, or musical. Without
words or a visual component, the music of the suite and Ellington’s sparse
comments about it implied a daring political statement – a demonstration,
by way of the Bard, of black power, a phrase first used in 1954 as the title
of Richard Wright’s non-fictional book about the emergence of Africa
from colonialism. By composing a Shakespearean work for a Canadian
festival, Ellington was placing questions of black identity outside American
history and geography, taking his case to the court of world opinion. Form
mirrored the political content. As an emblem of equality, the four “sonnet”
movements matched up the idiom of jazz with the language of Shakespeare
through syllable-to-syllable equivalence. Each “sonnet” presents a melody
with rhythms and phrase structures that correspond to fourteen lines of
iambic pentameter. The suite also declared its equal standing with the
Shakespearean canon, by favoring composition over improvisation. Like
a Shakespeare play, or like a symphony, Such Sweet Thunder is a text to be
performed. Ellington made the comparison explicit in his program note

for the Stratford premiere:
Anyone who listens to a beautifully performed symphony for the first time gains
something from it. The next time he hears it, he gains more; when he hears the
symphony for the hundredth time, he is benefited to the hundredth power. So it
is with Shakespeare. The spectator can’t get it all the first time; repeated viewings
multiply the satisfaction.
There is a perfect parallel with jazz, where repeated listening makes for
enjoyment.26
Once they had leveled the playing field with the Bard (and, for that matter,
with Beethoven, in such extended quasi-symphonic works as Black, Brown
and Beige or the Deep South Suite), Ellington and Strayhorn foregrounded
black sexuality not only in the characters of Othello and Cleopatra, but
also in Lady Macbeth, Henry V (alias Hank Cinq), “sister” Kate, Puck, and
Hamlet, all of whom speak in the language of the blues. The title track and
“Half the Fun” portrayed cross-race relationships, but not as a pas de deux.
The music, upending the Bard, speaks to a white Other from the point
of view of a black subject. The two Othello movements do not represent
Desdemona except as the implied listener; the title “Half the Fun,” and
Strayhorn’s exotically static music, indicated that the movement portrays
Cleopatra but not Antony. The two movements share a habanera rhythm,
which, thanks to Carmen, serves as a musical metaphor for difference and
sexuality (the film of Carmen Jones, music by Georges Bizet, words by
Oscar Hammerstein II, had recently put Dorothy Dandridge on the cover
of Life magazine as an African American femme fatale). Ellington and
Strayhorn reversed the usual hierarchy of difference, exchanging roles,
with two African characters telling their stories to silent, passive European
partners. Black speaking to white, Africa speaking to Europe, jazz speaking
to Shakespeare. The music presents half of the story – the half we have not
heard before.
Like Stravinsky’s score for Agon, and Bernstein’s for West Side Story,
Such Sweet Thunder demands close scrutiny.27 To suggest some directions
for further analysis, I will examine two movements, Ellington’s title track
“Such Sweet Thunder” and Strayhorn’s “Up and Down, Up and Down (I
Will Lead Them Up and Down).”
26 Ibid., 192.
27 The work receives a more detailed examination in my book, The Ellington Century.
190 david schiff
“Such Sweet Thunder”
Othello is a play about race (“an old black ram is tupping your white ewe”)
and about being and seeming. Othello seals his doom early by believing
that the self-evident facts of his existence will prevail against injustice: “My
parts, my title and my perfect soul, / Shall manifest me rightly.” Iago acts
out the opposite principle: “I am not what I am.” Othello, like Oedipus,
the model tragic hero, falls because of hubris; he does not understand that
his own power is as much a product of eloquence as are Iago’s malignant
fabrications; Othello’s military and amatory success depends on the power
of his discourse. He is both a soldier and a showman. When he says “Rude
am I in my speech,” he is deploying a classical tool of rhetoric, humilitas.
Unlike Oedipus, Othello also falls because of racism. To the Venetians, he
is a hero one moment and a “black ram” the next. As a minority of one,
he is particularly vulnerable to Iago, his white “manager.” They interlock
in a fatal co-dependence:
iago: I humbly do beseech you of your pardon,
For too much loving you.
othello: I am bound to thee forever.
Ellington’s career depended on a number of Iagos (you can fill in the

blanks), but the movement “Such Sweet Thunder” tells a different tale.
It is a “swerve” signaled, as Brent Hayes Edwards points out, by the
title which links the music “with an entirely different moment from a
different play.”28 Tragedy only enters with the ominous last note. The
music inverts the play’s poisonous hatred and instead explores Othello’s
“constant, noble, loving nature,” which inspires Desdemona’s fierce love
(“That I did love the Moor, to live with him, / My downright violence, and
score of fortunes, / May trumpet to the world.”) and Iago’s equally fierce
strangelove.
Shakespeare portrayed Othello in five acts; Ellington needed just six 12-
bar blues choruses plus a 4-bar shout phrase (composed by Strayhorn).
“Such Sweet Thunder” is a blues in a Phrygian-tinted G that wavers
between minor and major. Each chorus gives us a significant part of the
picture, as shown in Table 6.1.
Chorus one presents Othello’s proud stride through rhythm and his
exotic background through harmonies that defy the expected European
28 Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Literary Ellington,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies,
ed. Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia
Table 6.1 Formal design of “Such Sweet Thunder,” movement 1 from

Such Sweet Thunder
Section Musical description
Chorus 1 The bass instruments lay down an altered habanera rhythm spiked by
backbeats on the drums and R&B style triplets on the piano. In the
even-numbered bars, the long–short rhythm of the habanera
reverses to short–long, prolonging the already provocative As.
Chorus 2 The three muted trumpets superimpose a wah-wahed, chromatic
chord-melody on a restatement of Chorus 1.
Chorus 3 Saxes enter in a riff chorus in dissonant five-note harmonies over a
walking bass.
Chorus 4 A call-and-response alternation of saxes and an improvised trumpet
solo by Nance. On the last two bars, the trombones reprise the
opening habanera figure.
Shout insert Four bars tutti, fortissimo. (This may have been composed by
Strayhorn as a conclusion, then inserted as a climactic interlude
instead.)
Chorus 5 A composed, legato trombone solo played against a swung version of
the habanera rhythm in the saxes, all pianissimo. The last two bars
quietly reprise the habanera idea, harmonized and played by the
reeds.
Chorus 6 Repeat of Chorus 2, plus a fatal low F on the piano.
scale patterns. The rhythmic theme adds a kick of swagger to the usual
habanera rhythm, but its connotations – like those of the other stylis-
tic musical “topics” that Ellington employs – should not be reduced to
a caption. Besides indicating character, by refashioning Othello in the
image of Joe Louis or Sugar Ray Robinson, the rhythm stands in for
the meter of Shakespearian verse, equating the temporal structures of
the two art forms. Chorus two, with its echoes of early Ellington jungle
music, reveals the African inflections of Othello’s voice and develops his
resistance to European habits of thought; notice how Ellington slant-
rhymes the phrases with alternating G major and G minor chords. The
chorus sounds the trumpets that Desdemona, defying difference, will echo
in her proclamation of love.
The sudden change of gait (from gut-bucket habanera to walking bass)
and timbre (from brass to reeds) in Chorus 3 moves us from the public
theater of the Venetian Council Chamber (act one, scene three) toward
the private bedchamber (act five, scene two), a scenic jump-cut that com-
presses the story almost as compactly as the three words, “such sweet
thunder.” With Ellington, the move from public to private does not sound
like an exposure of weakness, as it does in the play; the man behind the
192 david schiff
public mask is just the other side of the coin. Ellington was “Duke” to the
public, “Edward” to friends and family. Othello’s thunderous and sweet
aspects may be the two sides of celebrity, or they may refer to W. E. B.
Du Bois’s famous definition of African American double consciousness, or
“twoness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unrecon-
ciled strivings.”29 Othello’s strivings, though interrupted by the inserted
shout phrase, do not sound disjunct, incongruous, or even tragically
flawed. Ellington’s music may be affirming Du Bois’s formulation by por-
traying an integral non-American African.
The central choruses present two aspects of Othello’s private side
divided by a brief flare-up. Perhaps Ray Nance’s seductive talking blues
solo in Chorus 4 is the Ellington/Othello known to a few intimates, while
the almost whispered trombone solo of Chorus 5 is the man known only
to himself. Chorus 6, a reprise, places the hero back on the public stage:
The Moor of Venice, the Duke of Ellington.
“Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up

and Down)”
Strayhorn’s title comes also comes from A Midsummer Night’ Dream –

but from act three, scene two:
puck: Up and down, up and down
I will lead them up and down.
I am fear’d in field and town.
Goblin, lead them up and down.
This movement was Strayhorn’s one new contribution to the suite. It is

probably the most complicated piece he ever wrote,30 and also may be
the greatest musical response to A Midsummer Night’s Dream since Felix
Mendelssohn. It was originally titled “Puck” – a title which brings to mind
the image of the young Mickey Rooney in the famous Max Reinhardt
film from 1935. In the play, Puck, attempting to do the bidding of his
master Oberon, creates two mismatched couples, Helena/Lysander and
Titania/Bottom (the weaver given the head of an ass by Puck’s spell), and
disrupts a third, Hermia/Demetrius, then undoes the damage by leading
29 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 1903), quotation
online at http://scua.library.umass.edu/duboisopedia/doku.php?id=about:double
consciousness (accessed 24 July 2015).
30 See the analysis in Van de Leur, Something, 159–61.
them all “up and down.” Strayhorn’s music, like Mendelssohn’s, does not
tell the story but captures the mood of giddy, moonlit confusion. Strayhorn
divides the band into “characters” portrayed by groups of instruments.
There are three instrumental couples: Jimmy Hamilton, clarinet, and Ray
Nance, violin; Russell Procope, alto, and Paul Gonsalves, tenor; Johnny
Hodges, alto, and John Sanders, valve trombone. There are also a reed
trio (clarinet, alto, tenor) and a mostly brass quintet (two trumpets, two
trombones, baritone sax – perhaps representing the Mechanicals). The
bass and drums keep things moving throughout; the pianist just listens
(as we do, in amazement). The only character who we can recognize
consistently is Puck, impersonated by Clark Terry, who increasingly takes
charge of the action as the piece unfolds and concludes the music by
“speaking” the line “Lord, what fools these mortals be.” Throughout the
piece Puck’s style is freer and bluesier than the other characters.
Strayhorn may well have thought of the piece as a self-portrait, with
Strayhorn as Puck, and Ellington off in the background as Oberon. We can
read the implications of this hypothesis in several different ways. Strayhorn
played a Puck-like role in relation to Ellington’s music which he was often
handed in a state of disorder and asked to complete (as he did, here, with
“Such Sweet Thunder”). As David Hajdu wrote, Strayhorn’s gift for order
complemented Ellington’s personality:
Ellington resisted completion . . . “As long as something is unfinished,” Ellington

said, “there’s always that little feeling of insecurity, and a feeling of insecurity is
absolutely necessary unless you’re so rich is doesn’t matter.” With Strayhorn on
hand, Ellington could keep that insecurity and gain the security of knowing that
something he dropped could now not only be finished but possibly improved.31
The confused couples and the band of Mechanicals both portray the band,
some of whose members barely spoke to each other for years, and many of
whom lived rough lives that were masked by their musical sophistication.
Strayhorn was admired by all, and may have served as a peacemaker while
Ellington preferred just to look the other way. Because Strayhorn often
did not tour with the band but remained in New York, he was in some way
a breed apart, above the fray and the frayed nerves of constant touring.
Strayhorn was also a breed apart sexually, as the band knew and accepted.
Moreover, as Hajdu shows, Ellington supported Strayhorn uncondition-
ally, a support that Strayhorn found “priceless.” George Greenlee, Stray-
horn’s close friend, told Hajdu, “Duke didn’t question his manliness.”32
31 Hajdu, Lush, 82. 32 Ibid., 79.

194 david schiff
Table 6.2 Formal design of “Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead
Them Up and Down),” movement 7 from Such Sweet Thunder
Reh. letter
mm. in score Musical description
1–8 Main subject first played by clarinet, alto, tenor; then by clarinet and
violin in thirds over tonic (C) pedal in bass.
9–10 A Interjection by “rude” Mechanicals (playing sophisticated harmony).
11–13 Double canon on main subject over dominant pedal in bass: clarinet and
violin lead, alto and tenor follow down an octave one bar later; alto
and trombone enter a bar later playing the inversion.
14–15 Second brass interjection.
16–24 Contrapuntal development of three couples over ostinato riffs in brass
and bass; harmony wavers between A-flat and G dominant 13ths.
Each couple now play inverted (mirror) imitations rather than
parallel thirds. At m. 24 the three couples play the “rude” figure,
perhaps indicating even greater confusion.
25–29 B Double contrary motion between couples.
30–33 Puck leaps in, brings the couples together and clarifies the harmony
(C7).
34 –41 C 8-bar call-and-response tune in F played twice (abab). In first four bars,
the trumpet follows, in the last four it takes the lead. This is the first
time in the piece where the bass articulates a clear chord progression.
42–53 D Call-and-response dialog between each couple and ad lib trumpet, over
C pedal in bass, two bars for each call and response.
54–61 E Contrapuntal imbroglio over a dominant pedal (G7) ostinato by the
Mechanicals. The sax and trombone couple, trombone now muted,
play a new chromatic chorale-like figure (Oberon?).
62–65 Puck and Mechanicals recall the tune.
66–75 F Call and response between Puck and couples who now appear to imitate
his calls.
76–81 Second imbroglio over ii-V alternation in bass. Clarinet and alto bring
back mirror figure from m. 17; alto and mute trombone play the
menacing “Oberon” theme; clarinet and violin play the squeaky riff
from m. 7; Puck tries to reassert leadership with a rising diminished
seventh arpeggio.
82–93 G Return of F major tune beginning with its second 4-bar phrase then
restating the original 8-bar form (bab) with Puck leading (reverse of
first time).
94–101 H Recap of mm. 1–8 (minus tenor sax in first four bars).
102–103 Final cadence, like a compressed version of the “rude figure.” Above the
sustained FMaj7 (or C major over F major) the trumpet “plays the
quotation.”
In this reading then, Puck’s cadential quotation can be heard as a gay

comment on the follies of the straight world (“what fools these mortals
be!”), a reversal of hierarchies that perfectly matches the overturning of
values already seen in the title track, and a point of view that would be
hard to find so openly expressed in films or novels from that time.
Because of its contrapuntal design, “Up and Down” feels more like a
Bach concerto grosso than a typical jazz chart. It alternates contrapuntal
episodes with a ritornello in the form of an 8-bar straight-ahead jazz tune
in F. I have outlined the form on Table 6.2, which shows, I hope, how
carefully Strayhorn shaped the music as a concerto for Puck, and why the
composition looms much larger than its actual temporal dimension of
just over three minutes.
Conclusion
My readings of the political implications of these two movements fall

somewhere between an empirical historical approach, such as found in
Harvey Cohen’s Duke Ellington’s America, and Theodor W. Adorno’s anti-
empirical notion of the inherent politics of musical idioms. An awareness
of the historical conditions is necessary to understand Ellington’s changing
strategies for political statement; at the same time, though, the music, like
any work of art, invites interpretation that goes beyond historical evidence
such as statements of an author’s attention and instead draws out the
inferences and implications of the text itself. Despite Ellington’s repeated
statements about his artistic mission, many of his critics have resisted
the notion that Ellington’s music even belonged in the category of art, a
political resistance often masked in terms of technique or taste. Attempts
to manage the overt or implied politics of Ellington’s music were further
complicated by the fact that, as Harvey Cohen has written: “As in other
areas of his life and like the music he most respected, Ellington, in his
politics and lifestyle steadfastly remained ‘beyond category,’ impossible to
pin down.”33
In statements Ellington made throughout his career he laid claim to the
same broad expanses of musical expression represented by other Ameri-
can composers, such as Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and by the great
European masters as well. But where critics recognized both the overt and
more subtle politics of the Concord Sonata or Appalachian Spring early
33 Cohen, America, 511.

196 david schiff
on – and even endowed these works with the power to define national iden-
tity – much of the older jazz criticism, and even some recent writings, ques-
tioned the ability of jazz in general and the Ellington/Strayhorn extended
works in particular to go beyond the bounded category of entertainment.
As Graham Lock put it: “much of the critical controversy around Black,
Brown and Beige . . . came down to the same notion – Ellington should
stick to playing dance music.”34 Over and over again, critics from both
the right and the left praised Ellington for his three-minute masterpieces,
but took him to task for any music that pushed past the narrow confines
of that genre. The claim that jazz is essentially performers’ music, and
the more pernicious charge, recently promulgated, astonishingly enough,
on the pages of the New Yorker in 2013 that Ellington was not really a
composer at all but just stole ideas from his band, have served to delimit,
contain, disarm and even erase the expressive intentions and achievements
of this huge body of music.35 The loss, however, has not been to the music,
which survives and thrives, but to the broader American culture which has
resisted viewing itself in the magnifying mirror of the Ellington/Strayhorn
oeuvre.
In The Ellington Century, I discuss Such Sweet Thunder in a chapter
about love rather than about politics, but in African American music, as
in African American literature – as in Shakespeare – the two subjects are
inseparable. In the writings of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X,
James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, the freedom to love demands a reclama-
tion of manhood and womanhood. In Such Sweet Thunder, Ellington and
Strayhorn replaced the degraded images of Porgy and Bess with regal por-
traits of Othello and Cleopatra. In these figures, sexuality is both private
and public, tender and powerful. At its most daring, Such Sweet Thunder
envisions sexuality as the foundation of freedom.
34 Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra,
Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 119.
35 Adam Gopnik, “Two Bands: Duke Ellington, the Beatles, and the Mysteries of Modern
Creativity,” The New Yorker, 23 and 30 December 2013, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/
12/23/two-bands (accessed 24 July 2015).
7 Duke Ellington in the LP Era
gabriel solis
Duke Ellington’s work in the LP era – which is to say, after 1950 – has
only recently begun to be viewed as canonical by critics and historians,
and is still relatively de-emphasized in the literature in comparison with
his work from 1945 and before. In an entry on Ellington in the stan-
dard reference work for jazz history, Gunther Schuller and André Hodeir
said, three separate times, that it is generally agreed that Ellington’s most
creative, best work comes from the period prior to 1945. The same entry
discusses, at some length, Ellington’s approach to composition, arranging,
and the piano, all with reference only to works composed for the pre-1945
band. James Lincoln Collier’s biography of Ellington dedicates seventeen
chapters out of twenty-three to the years before 1945, portentously titling
chapters 18 and 19 “The Old Hands Begin to Depart” and “Decline and
Fall,” respectively. Of course, there is no question that Ellington’s work
from the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s is excellent, and groundbreaking
in many ways. By 1945, he had long-since developed his “jungle” style;
he had written dozens of exemplary popular songs; he had developed an
arranging style that was distinctive, famously highlighting the particular
voices of the musicians in his band; and he had begun exploring large-
scale forms with, most famously, Black, Brown and Beige (1943). That
said, Ellington’s work in the LP era is not so easily dismissed as these older
critical paradigms suggest. The Far East Suite, the Sacred Concerts, and the
live recording from the Newport Jazz Festival are now generally accorded
places in the pantheon of Ellington’s best work. More importantly, from
a historical standpoint, the period after 1950 saw Ellington consolidating
his place in American musical history and engaging with changes in sound
recording technology in ways that were vital to the development of his
legacy as an artist and bandleader.
I do not intend to survey Ellington’s work after 1950 here, nor to provide
an apology for that body of work. Instead, I want to consider the ways his
work as a composer and bandleader, and the work of his band as musical
co-creators, creatively engaged the technological innovations of the mid-
twentieth century: magnetic tape, long-playing microgroove recordings,
197
198 gabriel solis
and stereo high fidelity.1 On a number of pre-1950 occasions, Ellington

had pushed the limits of recording technology by conceiving and recording
works substantially longer than the limits of a single 78-rpm side, and by
experimenting with stereo in the 1930s while recording for Victor. In many
ways he continued to push the boundaries of technology in his artistic
endeavors after World War II. For instance, like many of his midcentury
contemporaries, Ellington was pleased with and ready to exploit and
test the potentials of the new LP format. While contemporary musicians
and audiences seem to have been more favorably disposed to Ellington’s
albums from this time, critics were often quite harsh in their judgments of
these releases. The signal exception is the 1956 Columbia album, Ellington
at Newport, which at the time was seen as a major turning point in his
career and as a remarkable revitalization of Ellington’s orchestra. This
“rebirth” reception has been immortalized by Ken Burns as much as by
anyone as a moment of reclamation, where Ellington – through the vitality
of tenor soloist, Paul Gonsalves – recaptured his jazz bona fides.
The “rebirth” narrative surrounding the Newport recording may lead
to an over-reliance on a two-part periodization of Ellington’s career. We
might, along with contemporary critics, see an early Ellington, up to
roughly 1950, and a late Ellington, following his resurgence in the mid-
1950s. The interstitial years – 1950 to 1956 – might be seen as part of the
later Ellington or a transitional period; but in any case, we would be stuck
with a historiography that compartmentalizes Ellington’s work. Instead I
argue here that a careful examination of examples of Ellington’s LP-era
work may serve to better understand both his postwar work and aspects
of his career as a whole. Ultimately, methodologies from media studies,
focusing on media and technology as well as on musical works themselves,
help us to see Ellington after 1945 as a musician who continued to build,
often quite successfully, on his earlier work, while also exploring new
terrain.
Ellington and Music Technology before 1950
Duke Ellington was a technophile well before midcentury. Mark Tucker

established quite clearly the extent to which Ellington came into jazz
1 In response to the box set reissue of Ellington’s complete Victor recordings (Duke Ellington, The
Centenial Edition: Complete RCA Victor Recordings, 1927–1973, RCA 09026633862, 1999, 24-disc
set), Gary Giddens wrote an unusual article that serves as both survey of, and apology for,
Ellington’s later work: Gary Giddens, “The Long-Playing Duke,” Village Voice, 27 April 1999,
www.villagevoice.com/music/the-long-playing-duke-6421848 (accessed 2 February 2011).
Duke Ellington in the LP Era 199
primed with heady ideas from the major thinkers of the Black Renaissance
in the 1910s.2 His “renaissance education,” as Tucker described it, included
a number of components – notably a clear relationship with and interest
in both African American history and the connections between black
Americans and other people of the African diaspora. Although Tucker
does not dwell on contemporary ideas of modernism, following Davarian
Baldwin’s work on popular flowerings of Black Renaissance culture in the
1920s, I suggest that a positive orientation towards modernism, and the
promises it made about the role of technology in the progressive enterprise,
might also be an important facet of Ellington’s “renaissancism.”3
Ellington was a master in the use of the technologies of his time, savvy at
deploying them to his desired ends, and often, if not always, a connoisseur.
The European experience of World War I may have left artists of all
sorts with mixed feelings about the role of technology in human life,
but many Americans could reasonably see technology as the key to a
prosperous future; the African American elite was no different in this
regard than much of white America. Flanders’ fields and the terror of
mechanized warfare were a very long way from Harlem and Washington,
D. C. American cities were not bursting with legless, armless, blind and
deranged casualties of war, the way British and continental towns were
in the 1920s. For black artists and intellectuals, pre-Depression New York
was not death and dehumanization, not Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, nor even
Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, but rather a place of life, liberation,
and opportunity. For instance, Ellington prominently romanticized the
city and his long life as a New Yorker in his 1973 autobiography, Music Is
My Mistress, stating “New York is a dream of a song, a feeling of aliveness, a
rush and flow of vitality that pulses like the giant heartbeat of all humanity.
The whole world revolves around New York, especially my world. Very
little happens anywhere unless someone in New York presses a button!”4
2 Mark Tucker, “The Renaissance Education of Duke Ellington,” in Black Music in the Harlem
Renaissance, ed. Samuel A. Floyd (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).
3 Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negros: Modernity, Mass Migration, and Black Urban Life
(Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
4 Ellington, Mistress, 65. Music Is My Mistress is a problematic text, as are most jazz
autobiographies, and I use it advisedly here. Holly Farrington has noted that its “epic” quality –
placing Ellington’s life in a nearly biblical narrative of love and brotherhood, “accentuating the
positive,” so to speak – makes it unreliable, at best, for many details of Ellington’s career, and
even less useful for any objective understanding of jazz in American and European culture in
the period between 1920 and 1970. Holly E. Farrington, “Narrating the Jazz Life: Three
Approaches to Jazz Autobiography,” Popular Music and Society 29 (July 2006): 379–80.
Nevertheless, the book is an important source for Ellington’s own meta-commentary on his life
and music, and, if read critically, it can shed light on what he thought was important in an
assessment of his own past.
200 gabriel solis
This outlook was long held by Ellington and dates back as far as his D.C.
youth.
As Joel Dinerstein points out, Ellington seldom mentioned technology,
per se, in interviews from the 1930s.5 That he did not should hardly
be surprising, and has at least two reasonable explanations. First, the
interviews reflect not only Ellington’s thoughts and interests, but the
preoccupations of his interlocutors. His earliest interviews, both from
1930, are primarily about race, particularly the creation of an authentic
African American art.6 Certainly this was Ellington’s life-long occupation,
but it was also on the minds of the sorts of intellectuals just beginning
to take jazz seriously as an American expression at the time. By the end
of the 1930s, articles written by Ellington himself (or at least appearing
under his name) dealt extensively with his compositions, with what he
saw as good music, and with the question of where swing was headed.7
Again, these writings reflected Ellington’s interests and voice, but also
questions on the minds of jazz writers of the day. Second, beyond not
addressing technology because of a focus on Ellington’s art, more than his
career, it also seems unlikely that Ellington or the writers interviewing him
would have addressed the kinds of questions about technology that interest
scholars today as the publications were primarily written for fans and
broad, popular consumption. Nuts-and-bolts questions about recording
techniques or the structure of the industry and its place in America’s
larger industrial and commercial landscape might well have seemed too
mundane to interest popular audiences of the time. There is, however,
one hint in this Ellington journalism that points towards the kind of value
technology would have had to the composer/bandleader: throughout this
literature, Ellington shows a consistent orientation towards progress, and
this concern is very much in line with the African American social and
political landscape he occupied. Progress of many kinds was potentially
interlinked, so an interest in seeing the band grow, adding instruments,
and working towards technical refinement may be seen as encoding a
belief in the progress of African American people towards greater status
5 Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture
between the World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).
6 Tucker, Reader, 42–4.
7 See, especially, “The Duke Steps Out” (1931) and “My Hunt for Song Titles” (1933), both
published in Rhythm magazine and anthologized in Tucker, Reader, 46–9 and 87–90. The exact
provenance of these articles is perhaps questionable – given the workings of the music
PR/management business at the time, it is altogether possible these articles were ghost written.
Nonetheless, it is fair to say they represented something like Ellington’s ideas about his own
music.
and recognition as citizens of America and the world. Such concerns may
also reasonably be coupled with a belief in growing prosperity, and with
a kind of optimism that technology could both represent and facilitate in
interwar America.8
The most obvious pre-1950 expressions of Ellington’s interest in tech-
nology that look forward to his work in the “LP era” are in his playful,
open, and creative engagements with recording technology. In Music Is My
Mistress, Ellington describes an early experience with studio electronics as
a source of musical sound – or more precisely with reinterpreting studio
noise as musical material:
When we had made “Black and Tan Fantasy” with the growl trombone and growl
trumpet, there was a sympathetic vibration or mike tone. That was soon after they
had first started electrical recording. “Maybe if I spread those notes over a certain
distance,” I said to myself, “the mike tone will take a specific place or a specific
interval in there.”9
An emergent technology always has idiosyncrasies, in this case a con-

temporary microphone’s inability to reproduce certain sounds without
adding noise. Ellington reports here having grasped that fundamental fact
not as a flaw, but as a source of creative potential, and he sought to use this
added “tone.” He describes it as having “come off” and having created “an
illusion.” This technological epiphenomenon clearly became part of how
Ellington viewed the sonic nature of the piece itself. As he said, “To give it
a little additional luster for those people who remember it from years ago,
we play it with the bass clarinet down at the bottom instead of ordinary
clarinet, and they always feel it is exactly the way it was forty years ago.”10
Beyond reacting to phenomena introduced by the exigencies of record-
ing gear, Ellington and the people with whom he worked – notably his
manager, Irving Mills – manipulated the studio and production tech-
nologies of the interwar era to achieve specific musico-sonic effects. He
described trying to get a studio “sound” like what he was hearing in
recordings of British bands made in London this way:
8 Among other sources in Tucker, Reader, see Ellington’s thoughts on swing originally published
in Down Beat in 1939. These comments highlight “superior musicianship,” consistency, and
professionalism as the benefits of increasing commercialization of the music throughout the
1930s (ibid., 134).
9 Ellington, Mistress, 80. It is not entirely clear which recording of Black and Tan Fantasy
Ellington means here (he recorded the song at least five times between 1927 and 1929). It
seems likely that he meant the first recording of the number for Victor in October 1927
(released as Victor 21137 B, with Creole Love Call on the A side).
202 gabriel solis
[They] always seemed to have a special kind of resonance and echo, and Irving [Mills]
was attracted by this. One day, when we were recording a new tune called “Empty
Ballroom Blues,” we decided to try to get this effect. So he, we, and the engineers
all began experimenting. Before the session was finished, we had a microphone put
in the men’s john, and there we found the effect we wanted! It was the first Echo
Chamber, I think, and it has become a major recording device since then.11
Ellington’s work at Victor during the 1930s also suggested an imagination

that looked beyond the technology of the moment and in fact antici-
pated two of the major innovations of the postwar period, the LP era.
First, he routinely sought the opportunity to record works that extended
beyond the three-and-a-half-minute framework of the 78-rpm single side.
Whether these were medleys (like the combination of “East St. Louis
Toodle-O,” “Lots o’ Fingers,” and Black and Tan Fantasy that he recorded
in 1932) or rhapsodies (like the two 1931 versions of “Creole Rhapsody”),
he routinely recorded pieces that required both sides of a 78-rpm record or
even multiple discs or an album of multiple 78-rpm discs (e.g., the 1935,
two-disc release of Reminiscing in Tempo,12 or the 1944 album release of
Black, Brown and Beige excerpts, respectively). While this was normal for
classical recordings – for instance, works by Anton Bruckner or Gustav
Mahler could require a dozen discs – it was rare in prewar jazz, though not
necessarily in popular music trends like the symphonic jazz vogue of the
1920s.13 Reminiscing in Tempo may not have been released as an “album”
in the era of the 78-rpm disc (that is, its two discs may have been sold
separately, and the release may not have had accompanying promotional
apparatus to integrate the discs, such as graphic design or liner notes).
That said, it was certainly seen as a single work by Ellington. It is notable
11 Ibid., 87. Albin Zak describes the formal interest in the “sound” of recordings as a
preoccupation of rock “recordists,” his term for musicians and engineers for whom the
recording is the primary musical work. Albin Zak, The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making
Records (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 12–13, 48–50, 60–96). While Zak has
more recently looked to certain key producers from the 1940s, especially Mitch Miller, as
pioneers in this regard, it is interesting to note this same kind of musical logic apparently
infusing Ellington’s work with Mills as early as 1936 (or even the late 1920s, if one considers the
employment of microphone noise in Black and Tan Fantasy as the same kind of “sonic” formal
logic).
12 Reminiscing in Tempo was recorded in a single session on 12 September 1935. Each of its four
parts had two takes (see Vail, Diary, Part 1, 114). Enzo Archetti reviewed the album (and its
reviews) in 1936, and he clearly treated the number as a complete work that takes up four sides.
Originally published as Enzo Archetti, “In Defense of Duke Ellington and His ‘Reminiscing in
Tempo’,” American Music Lover 1 (April 1936), 359–60, 364; reprinted in Tucker, Reader,
121–5).
13 See the discussion of symphonic jazz, and Ellington’s relation to this trend, in Howland,
Uptown.
that its four sides were recorded in a single session in September of 1935,
with each of the four parts receiving two takes.14 Nevertheless, it is clear
from the contemporary reviews that critics, at least, along with Elling-
ton himself, clearly saw the four sides as constituting a single, long-form
work.15 Black, Brown and Beige was, indeed, not only conceived as a long-
form work, but released by Victor as such. Following the 1948 advent of
the long-playing disc, extended-track recording in popular music and jazz
ultimately became commonplace, but Ellington’s long-standing interest
in such a possibility anticipated this technological advance in the decades
before it became commercially possible. Even more explicitly techno-
logical were Ellington’s experiments with stereo recording. In 1932, well
before stereo playback equipment was available to a consumer market,
Ellington used Victor’s studio technology to make a stereo recording of
Mood Indigo, Hot and Bothered, and Creole Love Call, in a fluid medley
version, no less. Using two microphones, placed on opposite sides of the
recording room, recording separately to two synchronized master discs,
Ellington and Victor’s engineers were able to capture a performance with
a reasonable stereo field that literally could not be played on home audio
equipment of the time.
If the recording studio was the central location for making musical
products that could be sold to Ellington’s growing audience, it was only one
small part of the band’s commercial and creative activity. Live performance
and radio broadcasts certainly occupied more of their time, and both
activities were more important in establishing their reputation – at least
in the interwar period – and their ability to sell records. Ellington remarked
on his understanding of this dynamic in Music Is My Mistress, describing
“location” work, or engagements, lasting more than a week at a given club,
in the 1940s:
The money was often far from the greatest, but in addition to easing up on the
travel there was the big advantage of a regular radio broadcast. The air time could
be used by a band to plug its new music, and it was more or less a sure thing that,
after you had aired a particular song every night for four weeks, there would be
some reaction from the public. Having been raised in the Irving Mills tradition, I
knew how important it was to pick out something recently recorded and released,
so that it had a good chance of being ballyhooed.16
14 Vail, Diary, Part 1, 114. See Howland, Uptown, 171–6, for a more recent interpretation of this
work’s formal design.
15 See Archetti’s review of the discs and meta-review of the work’s reception in Tucker, Reader,
121–5.
204 gabriel solis
While the interlocking technologies of the recording industry (as discussed

above, technologies of the recording studio and of industrial production
and distribution) would have had the most obvious appeal to Ellington in
pursuing artistic goals, they were intricately interwoven with the rest of
the era’s entertainment technologies. Ellington, his management, Irving
Mills (and from 1938, the William Morris Agency), his musical bandmates
and collaborators, and the RCA Victor company (with which he would
do all of his major recording of the period) worked together to use these
interlocking technologies in the service of what was becoming a coherent
musical career. Each of the major technologies at Ellington’s disposal –
recording technology, growing transportation systems, broadcast commu-
nications networks, motion pictures, and more – allowed for the creation
of positive images that were invested in race pride and built the Ellington
brand. Attention to these interlocking technological spheres was positive
and profitable, and worked in Ellington’s interests and the interests of
Mills and the other institutional entities with which he intersected.
It is instructive to look at the things Ellington lists as his achievements
while under Irving Mills’s management (1931–8): recording only his own
music and getting it into hitherto white-only record catalogs; getting his
music into the Cotton Club and RKO Palace, both of which had broad-
casting contracts; making films, notably Black and Tan Fantasy (1929);
securing entrance into ASCAP; meeting the British royal family; perform-
ing with Maurice Chevalier; and touring the Deep South and Texas in their
own Pullman cars.17 Of these, only two – playing with Maurice Cheva-
lier and meeting the royal family – did not in some way involve career
advancement (and more or less explicitly the advancement of the race) via
modern institutions and the technologies that supported them. I suggest
that not only are industrial recording and publishing, broadcasting, trains,
and film contiguous in Ellington’s list, they are significantly interrelated in
the way he pursued his career in the context of modernity; and, inasmuch
as this is so, these interlocked technologies also relate to the connections
with Chevalier and the royal family. All these associations amount to an
argument about black advancement in the face of racial hostility and
retrenchment in the United States. Black musicians were frozen out of the
most lucrative jobs, but Ellington and Mills fought for his band’s access;
black bands were kept off the airwaves, but Ellington and Mills found
cross-racial distribution avenues for their work; black people were neg-
atively stereotyped on the silver screen, but Ellington and Mills crafted
17 Ibid., 77.
positive images for his film appearances; black composers were under-
paid for their work, but Ellington and Mills used a new rights agency to
ensure compensation; and black musicians were degraded by Jim Crow
laws when they toured, but Ellington and Mills used a technology of the
day (private Pullman cars) to circumvent the worst depredations.
Modern technology and modern institutions could thus be used to
secure black progressive ends; access to those technologies and institutions
were also the fruits of progress. Given the extent and depth to which this
logic was embedded in Ellington’s life as a successful musician, it is not
altogether surprising that he never wrote meta-theoretically about them
directly, as Dinerstein points out. They were so ubiquitous, they could
easily have seemed unremarkable. In any case, seeing the importance
of these aspects of Machine Age innovation moves beyond Dinerstein’s
argument in Swinging the Machine on the musical mediation of mechanical
sound and on the presence of machines as topoi in musical works.18 From
a different perspective, I argue that Machine Age technologies pervaded
Ellington’s musical life regardless of whether one considers programmatic
recordings that supposedly invoke machine culture, like Daybreak Express
and Take the “A” Train, or recordings that innovatively used technology
for artistic expression, such as Mood Indigo.
The LP Era?
The mid-twentieth century represents a significant break in virtually all

aspects of American and European cultural life, and jazz is no different
in this regard. The 1940s may be seen as a long decade of transformation,
the decade that saw the end of World War II, the emergence of atomic
weapons, major growth of the movement for black liberation in its Civil
Rights phase, and origins of the shift to a service-sector economy and
suburbanization of the country through the G. I. Bill and development of
mass higher education. In jazz, the 1940s saw the beginnings of modern
jazz, overlapping with the peak and ultimate decline of big band swing,
and the flourishing of the “trad jazz” revival. For the music industry, this
was a time of massive social change and technological innovation, both
substantially set in motion by the investment of bodies and resources
in the war. In the early 1940s, the balance of economic weight shifted
from live performance and broadcast to the sale and (most importantly)
18 See Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine.

206 gabriel solis
broadcast of recordings. For a number of reasons, the major recording

companies – Decca, Victor, and Columbia – who had consolidated their
position in the market by weathering the Depression were challenged in
the 1940s by a great flowering of small labels, most of which were oriented
towards specific genre niches.19 In fact, as John Howland has pointed
out, jazz itself emerged as a marketing category distinct from the rest of
popular music only in the 1950s.20 This was part of a larger process of
postwar market differentiation that gradually led to the fine-grained niche
marketing of the current time. Critically, jazz was not the only musical
genre to emerge as a marketing category at the time. The 1940s and 1950s
most importantly saw the rise of rock ’n’ roll out of blues, jazz, and country
and the development of “youth” as a primary market for entertainment.
Duke Ellington was no longer a young musician at the forefront of new
developments, but as a recognized star of the old guard, he was in a prime
position to exploit these technological advances to his own ends.
By the early 1950s, the trauma and deprivations of the war were fading,
but its institutional and technological consequences were being consoli-
dated and musicians were able to capitalize on these developments. For
the purposes of this chapter, I refer to the period of consolidation after
the 1940s as the “LP era,” but it is worth asking how reasonable it is to
identify this period as such. Would it be as well or better to write about
Ellington in the era of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements?
Ellington in the postwar era, the Cold War era, in the era of American
colonial crises, in the era of Asian military interventions? In the era of
television and the interstate highways? Mark Katz, whose book Capturing
Sound makes a strong case for “recording’s influence on human activity
and of phonograph effects,” suggests a reason for focusing on the LP not
as the only determinant of the era, but as a significant one.21 Katz is wary
of “hard” technological determinism – the idea that “tools, machines, and
other artifacts of human invention have unavoidable, irresistible conse-
quences for users and for society in general” – but continues to focus on
the “causal powers” technology exerts in people’s activities.22 I suggest that
as with understanding the bundle of technologies that Ellington used to
19 André Millard, America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 251; Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and
Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 299.
20 John Howland, “Jazz With Strings: Between Jazz and the Great American Songbook,” in
Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, ed. David Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and
Daniel Goldmark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 140–1.
21 Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 3, emphasis in the original.
22 Ibid.
move forward his artistic goals in the 1920s and 1930s, understanding his
relationship to new technology and new media in the 1950s and 1960s is
a matter of seeing how specific technological innovations were connected
with changing social institutions as media for individual creativity.
My point here is not simply to use the “LP era” as a shorthand for
the years between 1950 and 1985 or 1990; nor is it to argue that the
LP is somehow a, or the, prime historical motivator of Ellington or the
era. Instead, I offer a more limited argument: that the LP was one of three
major, interlinked technologies – along with magnetic tape and hi-fi stereo
recording and playback – that became widely distributed over the course
of the 1950s and had a broad impact on music and the music industry
between their introduction and being supplanted by digital recording and
playback in what we might call the CD Era. I further contend that they did
so in connection with all of the other changes that characterized America
and the American music industry at the time.
Circa 1960, the stereo, hi-fi, long-playing, microgroove record – the
LP – sold to be played on a home stereo system, was the culmination
of a process that had its roots in military research in World War II. The
technologies behind the LP allowed for increased sonic control in the
studio, production of longer works without the breaks necessitated by a
78’s three-and-a-half- or four-to-five-minute single-side limitations (for
ten- and twelve-inch discs, respectively), and much more robust editing,
both in production and post-production. Recording typically moved from
one- and two-microphone ambient recording to more close recording,
often with baffles between musicians to isolate sounds for later editing.23 In
the late 1940s and early 1950s, most studios moved from recording direct
to disc to utilizing magnetic tape, which could be cut and spliced easily
to compile recordings from multiple takes, and could ultimately be used
for overdubbing, although the ethos of “one good take” remained central
to most recording – especially to jazz – for decades. Indeed, minimally
edited live recording informs ideas about jazz recording even today.24
Most obviously, the new vinyl records could hold as much as twenty-five
minutes per side.
Each of these technologies allowed for more lifelike sound reproduc-
tion – high fidelity, or “hi-fi” – and a notable recreation of “space” via
the stereo field, but they also facilitated the creation of “studio audio art,”
that is, the creation of sonic virtual realities.25 Ellington ultimately used
23 Millard, America, 285. 24 Ibid., 289–90; Zak, Poetics, 10–11.

25 Thomas Turino, Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008), 78; Zak, Poetics, 13.
208 gabriel solis
the first two of these potentialities more directly, but as noted previously,
he was interested in the sonic phenomena that emerged only in the stu-
dio, via recording technology, even before the hi-fi era, and he was not
opposed to similar experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s. Most impor-
tantly, but not always noted by music historians, the LP stimulated the
market for music after the war, giving musicians – at least those, like
Ellington, who operated at a high level in the industry – access to income
that allowed them secure, middle-class lives. Jazz recordings used all of
these features to aesthetic and practical ends, and Ellington’s recordings
were no exception.26
Shifts in the music industry and jazz’s place in it were as important as
these changes in recording technology. The obvious story for the industry
is the rise of rock ’n’ roll, and the full-scale emergence of young people as
a market sector. The most common story told about jazz in this context is
its gradual move from popular, demotic, music for dancing – swing – to
niche, elite music for listening – modern jazz – as it was displaced by 1950s
rock ’n’ roll and later 1960s and 1970s rock. I suggest that Ellington’s work
in the LP era (and the hi-fi LP format) can be seen as a creative response
to – even an embrace of – this process. Keir Keightley has charted the ways
that discourse about hi-fi systems and hi-fi music between 1948 and 1959
correlate to the development of postwar, middle-class, white, masculine
culture. I would add “hip” culture, as what he is describing is the re-coding
of the “middlebrow” as feminine, and the embrace of a high/lowbrow hip
alternative as both masculine and adult.27 While classical music was one
important realm for the growth of masculine hi-fi culture, jazz was its
music, par excellence. Although bebop and later postbop were the clearest
examples of music embraced by this audience as hip and anti-middlebrow,
it is instructive to look at Ellington’s work in the LP era in relation to this
social and aesthetic shift. Modern jazz directly found a place in American
culture after the war in this new social milieu, but Ellington had to find
a way to transition from prewar to postwar American culture in order
to remain successful. His work before the war already pointed in some
of the directions modern jazz would take, but was decidedly middlebrow
in other ways. The use of the term “hi-fi” in at least one of Ellington’s
album titles from the period suggests his (or, rather, Columbia’s) interest
in marketing his music to this audience.
26 Millard, America, 201.

27 Keir Keightley, “‘Turn It Down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity,
1948–59,” Popular Music 15 (1996): 173.
Ellington’s LPs
Duke Ellington’s work in the LP format should be seen as multiply

authored. Ellington himself clearly had a primary authorial voice in the
material that was released under his name, as he had in the years before,
but he was as (or even more) reliant now on others to create his commer-
cial recordings. For instance, Ellington leaned heavily on Billy Strayhorn
to craft his compositions into performable arrangements, as well as to pro-
vide new compositions for the band’s repertoire; he relied on the musicians
in the band as interpreters and improvisers; and more than ever he was in
dialog with engineers and producers to shape compositions into albums.
Nevertheless, in retrospect, it is reasonable still to think of this output as a
coherent body of work, if only because of the fact that it was released using
Ellington’s name as both an organizing device and promotional hook.
Not everything Ellington recorded from the 1950s on was released in
LP format. For example, particularly in the 1950s, jazz singles continued
to be important for radio airplay, as were 16-inch transcription discs.
Moreover, Ellington’s work was released on a number of less-common
formats, including 7-inch extended-play discs (both 45 rpm and 33⅓ rpm)
and 45-rpm singles. Nevertheless, Ellington’s work on LP was extensive,
encompassing three major types of albums:
r LPs recorded as such with some clear organizing concept, specifically
utilizing the length afforded by the format, not only to produce longer
tracks, but to make some kind of musical “argument” over the LP as a
whole;
r LPs by default – quotidian works, either newly recorded or reissued, that
do not clearly use the LP as a technology, but that are on LP because
that was the format of the period; and
r concerts, which constitute a special category, because they were not
necessarily conceived as LPs, but use the length of the format to an
obvious end.
Of these three types, the first most consistently used para-musical aspects
of the LP as a commodity – cover art and liner notes – to extend the
albums’ work-like qualities.
Ellington’s first album recorded and released as an LP, the 1950 Mas-
terpieces by Ellington, is indicative of the ways he and his collaborators
would exploit the format.28 The album contained extended performances
28 Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Masterpieces by Ellington, Columbia ML4418, 1950, LP.
210 gabriel solis
of three older pieces – a fifteen-minute “Mood Indigo,” twelve-minute

“Sophisticated Lady,” and just over eight-minute “Solitude” – along with
an eleven-minute rendering of “The Tattooed Bride.” This final compo-
sition, which the band premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1948, is a through-
composed work in the mold of Reminiscing in Tempo or the movements of
Black, Brown and Beige, but unlike these more discussed extended works,
“Tattooed Bride” sits in a sense on the edge of Ellington scholarship.
Max Harrison, Stuart Nicholson, and Ted Gioia all gesture towards its
importance. In 1976, Harrison said the piece “may eventually emerge as
his unacknowledged masterpiece,” but by 1999 Nicholson still found that
it was “among his least understood works, often with a grittiness and
awkwardness that flew in the face of jazz conventions.”29
As it prominently proclaims in its title, the notion of “masterpieces”
underwrites this album project as a whole and clearly connects Columbia’s
marketing to the emergent “highbrow” discourse of hi-fi music, as Keight-
ley suggests. A press release for the album, titled “Duke to Cut ‘Different’
LP” plays up the importance of the LP format, and reminds potential
audiences of their new opportunity to buy Ellington’s art as he (and then
Columbia A & R chief, Mitch Miller) conceived it. “Columbia records is
planning a unique excursion into Ellingtonia,” it begins, having drawn
readers’ attention with the highlighted, quote-mark-enhanced “Differ-
ent.” It further adds, “Using LP records, the company is anxious to have
Ellington and the band do standard works like Caravan, Mood Indigo,
Creole Rhapsody, and Black and Tan Fantasy without the time and space
problems created by the 78-rpm record.” It is smart marketing, if nothing
else; building on insider audiences’ knowledge that in concert the band
often played the same pieces it had recorded in much longer versions than
the 78-rpm format allowed, Columbia marks technology as both a prob-
lem (78s) and solution (LP records). The press release finishes, “Columbia
artist and repertoire chief Mitch Miller wants Duke to record his works
exactly as they are performed . . . without having to worry about when the
three minutes are up.”30 The symbiotic relationship implied here between
studio (in the person of Mitch Miller) and artist is notable, giving the
jazz aficionado and record collector audience a sense of “inside scoop.”
This strategy also provides two figures with which to identify in buying
the album – Miller, the business executive, with his widely recognized
goatee and horn-rimmed glasses marking him as “hip” (at least in 1950),
and Ellington, the creative genius, whose works had previously suffered
29 Tucker, Reader, 392; Nicholson, Reminiscing, 257. 30 Vail, Diary, Part 2, 9.

cuts in recording. Interestingly, the press release does not mention new or
extended compositions, although both areas of artistic production were
central to later reviews of Ellington’s work from the period.
Columbia followed up Masterpieces with the 1953 release, Ellington
Uptown. The latter album was released in three separate versions – as
Ellington Uptown (ML4639), and in two versions under the title Hi-Fi
Ellington Uptown (CL830 and CL848) – with slightly different repertoire
on each. The release marketing and production strategies for the album
stay close to the template set by Masterpieces, particularly as it notably
exploits the new technology as a selling point.31 This could easily have
been the impetus of producer George Avakian, or even more likely an exec-
utive in the company’s marketing department. The title of Hi-Fi Ellington
Uptown points prominently to the new technology, in a way that the first
release of the album had not, but the outstanding feature of the CL830
release is the prominence of period hi-fi hype on the back record jacket.
In what was standard product design for Columbia at the time, the lowest,
rightmost quarter of the cover is dedicated entirely to promoting the new
LP format. Listeners are told – twice, once in italics and once in bold caps –
that Columbia guarantees “high fidelity in ‘360’ hemispheric sound,” and
further titillating potential buyers with the promise of enlarged “horizons
of listening pleasure.” Columbia also provides technical guidelines for
use, remonstrating users that full satisfaction requires proper handling,
notably suggesting the recommended needle life for metal, sapphire, and
diamond styluses. That this was part of Columbia’s general marketing at
the time and not unique to Ellington’s releases should not obscure the
importance of finding it here along with Hi-Fi in the album’s title. Elling-
ton at this point was being marketed to a predominantly adult consumer,
as this design suggests.
Stanley Dance’s liner notes (printed, it should be noted, in much
smaller type than the needle life chart or the touting of “360” hemispheric
sound) confirm the upmarket value of this music that deserves its high-
fidelity presentation. Noting the “full-length concert arrangements” of the
pieces on this album, and the “careful craftsmanship” in arrangement and
performance, Dance makes a plea for Ellington’s work as the only true
music of its kind. In a virtuoso flourish of highbrow/lowbrow prestidig-
itation, he says, “Without ever making pretentious claims to officiating
at the ridiculous marriage of popular and classical music, the Ellington
31 Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Ellington Uptown, Columbia ML4639, 1953, LP, and Hi-Fi
Ellington Uptown, Columbia CL830 and CL848, 1953, LP.
212 gabriel solis
orchestra nevertheless serves as an almost solitary ground where imagina-

tive popular thought is controlled by classical traditions. In the develop-
ment of an Ellington arrangement, no matter how exciting it becomes as
it builds, is a classical precedent.” John Howland has shown convincingly,
elsewhere, just how complicated the application of “brow” discourse to
Ellington’s work was – not only at this point in his career, but already
decades before.32 In light of this, I would think of Dance’s movement
back and forth between “brows” as precisely the discursive constitution
of middlebrow, or as Russell Lynes suggested, tongue-in-cheek, at the
end of the 1940s, “upper middlebrow.” Dance casts Ellington here as a
“tastemaker,” but one whose connections to the vernacular put him in
a “sweet spot”: less stuffy than a true highbrow tastemaker, and more
refined than a run-of-the-mill jazzer, so to speak.
One interesting thing about it is that it seems clear that Columbia,
Dance, and Avakian thought Ellington’s work in the 1950s was ideally
suited to – and could be sold to – precisely the hi-fi audience that Keightley
identifies, who were looking to records to provide an antidote to the
anodyne middlebrow. It is classical (highbrow) and popular (lowbrow),
but importantly not “the ridiculous marriage of classical and popular
music” (middlebrow, the specter of Paul Whiteman, Andre Kostalanetz,
and the Boston Pops, under the baton of Arthur Fiedler at the time). As
Gary Giddens has said of Ellington’s work from this period, “Performers
like Ellington . . . could no longer compete on AM radio; the LP was ideal
for them and their audiences.”33
What role Ellington played in exploiting the technological possibili-
ties for this recording is unclear except inasmuch as he clearly selected
repertoire that showcased the potentials of the long-playing format.34
An unsigned review of the ML4639 release in Down Beat homed in on
the presentation of extended works as the most important aspect of this
recording for jazz audiences. After both describing Louie Bellson’s drum
solo in “Skin Deep” as “sensational on the stage, slightly jejune on the
32 Howland, Uptown.
33 Gary Giddens, “The Long-Playing Duke,” Village Voice, 27 April 1999, www.villagevoice.com/
music/the-long-playing-duke-6421848 (accessed 4 September 2015)
34 While his exploitation of the technology, per se, may be unclear, the fact of his interest in
exploiting his recordings, generally, was absolutely clear. As Ralph J. Gleason wrote in a brief
interview with Ellington from 1953, “It’s . . . significant that he is interested in promoting his
records to such an extent that he spent hours in San Francisco working out a letter to be mailed
to disc jockeys!” Vail, Diary, Part 2, 57.
phonograph” and “The Mooche” performance as “virile” and “myste-

rioso,” the reviewer quickly moves to the album’s recording of “A Tone
Parallel to Harlem”: “But let’s get to the point: the real reason this LP is
a must for collectors is the presence of Duke’s Harlem suite, first played
by the band at the Met in Jan., 1951, now recorded in its 14-minute
entirety.”35
In fact, in a sense, Ellington was already, perhaps, looking beyond the
LP’s thirty-five- to forty-minute capacity as the repertoire on the three
issues of this album attests. For the project, Ellington essentially recorded
four slightly extended versions of several of his standard works (“The
Mooche,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and “Perdido,” plus the new Louie Bellson
drum feature, “Skin Deep”), two of which were released in advance as
a 7-inch, 45-rpm EP, plus three major extended works (“A Tone Parallel
to Harlem,” “Controversial Suite,” and “Liberian Suite”).36 While these
tracks all fit handily on a CD, they collectively exceeded the time limitations
of a period LP, and so they were released variously on three different
albums.37
These recordings certainly use the length of the new format to some
end; they were also clearly intended to exploit the sound quality of the
new recording technologies. The LPs do sound remarkably clear and
vibrant, and while they were recorded before Columbia had transitioned
to stereo recording, they do notably use “vertical” effects (via mix volume,
essentially, to mimic up- and downstage aural presence) which create
the illusion of “being there” with the musicians, wherever one imagined
“there” to be – the studio, concert hall, or one’s own living room.38
On “The Mooche,” for instance, Louie Bellson’s drums – primarily ride
cymbal, the clearest part of the drumset – are crisp, but quiet, and mixed
well to the back of the space, while Wendell Marshall’s bass – which is
often the muddiest instrument in the track, and the least satisfyingly
recorded instrument on LPs from this period – is clear and punchy, while
retaining a full, deep sound, mixed somewhat forward of the drums and
piano. By contrast, the ensemble horns are remarkably clear, making their
harmonies easily distinguishable. The soloists, when they enter, are almost
disconcertingly present. They are close to the microphones, their sound
35 Ibid., 56. 36 “Skin Deep”/“The Mooche,” Columbia B-386, 1953, 7-inch EP.
37 Ellington Uptown, Columbia ML 4639 (with “A Tone Parallel to Harlem”), Columbia CL 830
(with “Controversial Suite”), and CL 848 (“Liberian Suite” and “A Tone Parallel to Harlem”).
38 Later re-issues, including LPs, use “pseudo-stereo” effects, panning low frequencies
disproportionately into the left channel and high frequencies to the right.
214 gabriel solis
being mixed with slightly more reverb than the rest of the band. During
the quieter moments of melodic filigree in Russel Procope’s clarinet solo,
it is easy to hear the light clicking of key noise – a sound, incidentally, that
was largely absent from recordings before multiple miking, but also not
usually audible in a concert hall or ballroom setting.
These two post-1950 albums remain “albums,” in the older, 78-rpm
sense of the term, a collection of recordings with no through-line, no pro-
gram, or no obvious concept at work. Around this time, however, Ellington
and his collaborators in the industry began to produce recordings with a
sense of cohesion to them as well, beyond that provided by the fact that all
the pieces on any given album showcased the same musicians. In 1953, for
instance, Capitol Records, Ellington’s new label, released a concept album,
Premiered by Ellington, composed of songs that Ellington had popular-
ized but not written. The songs – “Stormy Weather,” “My Old Flame,”
“Flamingo,” “Stardust,” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” “Liza,”
“Three Little Words,” and “Cocktails for Two” – have relatively little to
do with one another, aside from their shared association with Ellington.39
The album may well have been Ellington’s (or his producer’s at Capitol)
entry into the “mood music” format that was popular in the day. Though
the recording does not use strings, its emphasis on prewar pop standards
and smooth sound certainly link it to the format.40 Evidence of the way
this album sat between mainstream pop and jazz taste as a “middlebrow”
product can be seen in the words of one reviewer, writing in Down Beat,
who said, “The preponderance of ballads at times gives the result a seda-
tive quality.” Calling it “an ideal album . . . to play for elderly relatives,”
the reviewer nonetheless also suggested it was “a novel premise.”41 The
interest in creating a conceptually (if not musically) unified album was
important, would become common in jazz, and ultimately pointed in the
direction of the rock concept album.
The 1956 Bethlehem release, Historically Speaking: The Duke, uses
Ellington’s own catalog as a conceptually unifying device, offering new
recordings of historical arrangements of such major works as “East St.
Louis Toodle-O,” “Jack the Bear,” and “Ko-Ko.”42 The value of hi-fi, in
and of itself, was wearing off by this point, when the LP had all but com-
pletely dominated the market, and would soon be the only album format
39 Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, Premiered by Ellington, Capitol H440, 1953, LP.
40 For more on “mood music” in the 1950s, see Howland, “Jazz with Strings,” 130.
41 Vail, Diary, Part 2, 64.
42 Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Historically Speaking: The Duke, Bethlehem BCP60, 1956,
LP.
available, in any case. As another Down Beat reviewer noted: “The album
as a whole is enjoyable but not indispensable, since none of the re-created
tracks are equal in quality to their originals as available on reissue LPs on
Brunswick, Victor, Columbia, etc. . . . There are . . . solid kicks, but I would
counsel those of you buying on a budget to get the originals before you
add this to your library, hi-fi notwithstanding.”43
The 1956 release, A Drum Is a Woman, Ellington’s “tone parallel” of the
mythic origins of jazz (recorded in late 1956 and then refashioned for a
8 May 1957 U. S. Steel Hour telecast, as discussed by John Wriggle in this
volume), and the 1957 album of Such Sweet Thunder, his tribute not just
to William Shakespeare but more specifically to the Stratford, Ontario,
Shakespeare Festival (discussed by David Schiff in this volume), were his
first extended, multi-movement jazz works to be released specifically as
LPs, and they are among the first extended jazz compositions to take
advantage of the new medium. (Other early releases in this vein include
Stan Kenton’s 1951 ten-inch Capitol Records LP, City of Glass, a multi-
movement work by Bob Graetinger.) These two recordings set the stage
for Ellington’s production of numerous such suites in the 1960s. Unlike
Ellington’s previous extended works (from Creole Rhapsody to the suites
he recorded for the Uptown sessions), but like virtually all the later suites,
A Drum and to a lesser extent Thunder are works conceptualized more or
less explicitly as albums. (As noted, Thunder was written for the Stratford
Shakespeare Festival, but it was premiered at New York’s Town Hall on 28
April 1957, rather than at this festival or via the album.)
Both suites ideally utilize the length of the LP of the time – with Drum
coming in at roughly forty-four minutes, and Thunder close to thirty-
seven minutes. Moreover, both divide coherently into two halves, and
thus two sides of a record. Drum’s fifteen short pieces are organized into
four parts, each one of which features one place in the geography of
the fable of jazz’s early history: the West Indies, where Carribee Joe first
plays his drum, called Madam Zajj; New Orleans, where Madam Zajj is
at Buddy Bolden’s side for a Mardi Gras parade and plays for a dance in
Congo Square; in the cities of the world and out into space (in “Ballet of
the Flying Saucers”); and, finally, in New York where the West Indies and
African America come together in “Rhumbop.” Parts I and II fit on side A,
and parts III and IV handily take up side B. The two sides also emphasize
a break between the mythic past in the West Indies and New Orleans, and
a mythic future-oriented present, in outer space and Manhattan.
43 Millard, America, 207; Vail, Diary, Part 2, 91.

216 gabriel solis
Such Sweet Thunder less clearly uses the A and B sides of the LP as a
conceptual or even practical device, but this release suggests the emerging
close conceptual connections that existed between Ellington’s LP releases
of post-1950 suites and the origins of these works as specially conceived
live performance events. My concern, however, is how well this work fits
the recording medium of the LP. As a whole, the suite moves convincingly
through a series of medium, slow, and up-tempo numbers, opening with
appropriate gravitas and ending energetically. No strong case can be made
for the break between the end of side A (“The Telecasters”) and the begin-
ning of side B (“Up and Down, Up and Down”) being conceptualized in
terms of the LP, per se. The second half is, in general, more upbeat, and less
introspective, opening with Midsummer’s Puck and closing with a paean
to “the Bard” himself. This, however, is as easily explained by the suite’s
origins as a concert work, as it follows a common (and effective) way of
managing the energy of a performance, by starting mid-tempo and grand,
then introducing slower, more contemplative material, and then gradually
moving to light, faster movements just when audiences might otherwise
begin to tire. The most interesting moment in the Thunder LP, particularly
in terms of Ellington’s use of technology, is the piano solo at the begin-
ning of the “Sonnet in Search of a Moor,” which Irving Townsend’s liner
notes tell us “Duke calls a ‘Hi-Fi’ introduction.”44 Here Ellington provides
what appears to be a winking nod to the much touted benefits of the new
recording formats, both the “full frequency range recording” pioneered by
British recording engineers and the “‘360’ Hemispheric Sound” touted on
the cover of Such Sweet Thunder as capable of producing recordings “cov-
ering the entire 30 to 15,000 cycle range within a plus or minus 2-decibel
tolerance.” The solo almost perversely jumps between extreme bass and
treble registers, Ellington striking the highest notes at a pianissimo that
would likely have been inaudible on recordings of fifteen or twenty years
earlier. One imagines him amused by, but also pleased with the sonic,
artistic possibilities afforded by the format.
This use of the LP medium, itself, as a part of the form of musical
works is one of the hallmarks of the Rock Era. Rock writers consistently
point to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, from 1966, and the Beatles’ Sgt.
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, from 1967, as the first full-fledged
concept albums. From a broader generic perspective, one might point to
Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music albums and
44 Irving Townsend, liner notes for Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Such Sweet Thunder,
Columbia CL1033, 1957, LP.
The Genius Hits the Road, as precursors in the early 1960s, and even to
Frank Sinatra’s Capitol releases in the 1950s, which were indeed described
as concept albums.45 I hesitate to suggest that Ellington’s suites from the
1950s are concept albums in the way that Sgt. Pepper’s, The Who’s 1969
rock opera, Tommy, or Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979) are. If nothing else,
these Ellington releases from the 1950s do not incorporate para-musical
materials (liner notes, photography, film) into the work’s narrative. But
unlike earlier program music from the classical tradition, music which is a
usual point of comparison for these Ellington suites, these releases do very
much work like albums: they fit on albums, and each of their constituent
parts is a typically short, three-to-five minute length. The most important
point here is not whether any particular Ellington recording should be
seen as a concept album, but rather that Ellington was quick to see and use
one of the format’s major potentials, and one that would be recognized
and exploited massively by rock artists in the following decade.
The most celebrated of Ellington’s LPs from the 1950s – and possi-
bly the most celebrated of all his LPs – was the Columbia release of his
performance at the Newport Jazz Festival of 1956 – except that, as many
people now know, it was not actually a recording of that specific perfor-
mance. Ellington at Newport was, rather, a hybrid, as it was made in the
studio as much as on stage at Newport. It combined the original tapes of
the 1956 concert with studio overdubs added the following week in New
York.46 Phil Schaap’s liner notes for the CD reissue of Newport (Complete)
decry the “doctoring” of the original recording, casting George Avakian,
the initial producer of the recording (until he was replaced, at Ellington’s
insistence, by Irving Townsend) as a villain – if more misguided than
nefarious, perhaps. The full details of Avakian, Townsend, Ellington, and
the band’s work to make something releasable out of the Newport concert
are now largely known, and can be found in short form in Schaap’s liner
notes and in long form (and somewhat more sympathetically) in John
Fass Morton’s book, Backstory in Blue.47
While Avakian’s decision to replace much of the live performance with
studio work may now seem problematic, it is at least understandable in
light of contemporary audience expectations of recordings. It seems that
45 Will Friedwald, Sinatra! The Song Is You (New York: Scribner, 1995), 26–7.
46 Phil Schaap, liner notes for Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, Ellington at Newport
(Complete), Columbia Records/Legacy C2K 64932, 1999, CD, 21–2.
47 John Fass Morton, Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport ’56 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 2008). Also see Darren Mueller, “Quest for the Moment: The Audio
Production of Ellington at Newport,” Jazz Perspectives 8 (2014): 3–23.
218 gabriel solis
Avakian wanted to create the impression of “being there” while also deliv-
ering hi-fi sound. Paul Gonsalves’s tenor solo in the interlude between
Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue was the height of the perfor-
mance, and was mythologized almost as soon as it happened. For Avakian’s
work, the most obvious problem with the original tapes was, famously,
that Gonsalves played into the wrong microphone (his solo was recorded
by Voice of America for broadcast). Columbia needed a version of this
performance where the solo was audible over the band. Schaap argues
that Columbia might have been better off simply rerecording the concert
in its entirety, in the studio; but one doubts Ellington would have been
happy with that. As Schaap says, Ellington was already worried that the
band would not be able to recapture the energy from the festival perfor-
mance – which was, by all accounts, exceptional.48 Overdubbing, however,
was a relatively new and exciting technology, and a producer might rea-
sonably have thought it offered the best solution to the dilemma, thereby
keeping mostly the original performance, but enhancing it. That many
of the other solos were also rerecorded, stage announcements newly pro-
duced, and canned audience noise edited in, follows the same basic logic.
Ellington may have been unhappy with how Avakian went about editing
the tapes, but the fundamental issue – the mixing of live and studio bits
to create a composite track – was probably not the problem. It is only
more recently, as general listeners have become more familiar with the
processes of recording – with the development of in situ (site-specific)
recording technology more capable of producing high fidelity, and the
culture at large more wary of technological manipulation of the appar-
ently “real” – that Columbia’s hybrid Newport recording could become
truly controversial.
Ellington’s forays into pop “crossover” in the mid-1960s, particularly
the albums Ellington ’65 and Ellington ’66 (both on Reprise), are minor
items in Ellington’s oeuvre, certainly. The albums’ crossover intentions
were signaled by the choice of repertoire, which was drawn largely from
the “Great American Songbook,” or from contemporary rock. Ellington
’65, for instance, included Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (which
had been popularized by Peter, Paul, and Mary in 1963), and Ellington
’66 included two Beatles songs, “All My Loving” and “I Want to Hold
Your Hand.” Beyond repertoire, the albums follow the “Songbook” style,
including lush, arranged sound, and limited solo improvisation. As Brian
Felix notes, in his dissertation on rock repertoire in 1960s jazz, “rock and
48 Schaap, liner notes to Ellington at Newport, 22.

pop tunes did not become a part of Ellington’s regular repertoire and
[thus] function as something of a blip-on-the-radar when considered in
the overall arc of Ellington’s career.” What is more, while Ellington ’66
was something of a critical success within jazz – winning Down Beat’s
critics’ poll “album of the year” and the year’s Grammy award for “Best
Instrumental Jazz Performance, Large Group” – it did not have the sort
of crossover success, as did, for instance, Lee Morgan’s “Sidewinder.”49
The albums are most interesting not for the compositions, arrangements,
or solos, as much as for the sound of the recordings. Felix points out
that Ellington and Strayhorn (who provided the arrangements) made
relatively little attempt to incorporate rock idioms beyond repertoire.
As he points out, the tracks importantly retain jazz rhythmic frame-
works and jazz arranging styles, but Felix does not address the issue of
recording sound, which does show an attempt to engage rock on its own
terms.
The use of stereo field and miking to produce a sense of space is, in fact,
dramatically different on both of these recordings than any of Ellington’s
Columbia and RCA recordings from the 1950s or 1960s. While the stereo
Columbia and RCA recordings produce a three-dimensional space, with
minimal panning, substantial bleed-through between channels, and, most
importantly, a differentiation of front and back (or upstage and downstage,
as it were), these two Reprise albums have more extreme panning, limited
bleed-through, and a nearly flat space.50 Throughout the album the reeds
are placed to the right, brass to the left, and rhythm section in the middle,
with soloists placed on the same side as their section, but somewhat closer
to the center. There is so little bleed-through that on headphones the
experience can be aggressive. For instance, when the claves enter in “All
My Loving,” their click is loud and present, but totally disconnected from
the other instruments. The sound is far more similar to rock of the period
than to contemporary jazz recordings, though unlike the Beatles or Jimi
Hendrix, who were using panning effects (along with extensive delay and
other tape manipulations) to produce non-naturalistic audio recordings,
49 Brian Felix, “Rock Becomes Jazz: Interpretations of Popular Music by Improvising Artists in
the 1960s” (DMA thesis, University of Illinois, 2010), 30.
50 This is a matter of degree, of course – . . . And His Mother Called Him Bill (1967) has
remarkably subtle use of stereo, while The Far East Suite (1966) has a noticeable separation
between right and left. For instance, on the latter album, “Isfahan” presents saxes in the right,
brass in the left, and Johnny Hodges’s solo and rhythm section in the center, with Hodges to
the front and everyone else behind him. Still, the level of bleed-through between each part is
more pronounced than on Ellington ’66.
220 gabriel solis
Ellington’s two releases use stereo mostly to produce crisp, clearly sepa-
rated instrumental sounds. Notably, in line with rock production of the
time, the drums on Ellington ’66 are much more prominent than on most
of his other albums – not relegated to the background, they come out on
the musical surface, panned to one side.
In addition to the remarkable number of albums Ellington recorded in
this period with his own band members – in large-ensemble formats, and
often in smaller groups, such as the 1959 recordings Back to Back and Side
by Side, which he co-led with Johnny Hodges – Ellington also recorded
with major figures in “all-star” lineups in the 1960s. Of these collabo-
rations, with Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Charles
Mingus, and Max Roach, the 1963 Impulse! recording, Duke Ellington and
John Coltrane, stands out. Ellington seldom recorded in a quartet setting,
and in smaller ensemble contexts (as well as larger) he primarily played
and recorded with musicians he employed, particularly his long-term side-
men. In this release and in Money Jungle, also from 1963, Ellington faced
the challenge of dealing with the egos of musicians he would not necessar-
ily work with again. In the case of the recording with Coltrane, Ellington’s
long experience in the studio, and his generally pragmatic approach to
recording technology, were decisively important. As the date’s producer,
Bob Theile, recalled, Coltrane was becoming increasingly uncomfortable
with his own recorded work throughout the early 1960s, recording mul-
tiple takes of virtually every piece on a date. Theile said, “Of course,
Ellington knew, from decades of experience making classic records in the
studio, if you get it, save it.”51 With Ellington’s encouragement, the band
– which included members of each leader’s working rhythm section of the
time in alternation (respectively, Aaron Bell, bass, and Sam Woodyard,
drums, and Jimmy Garrison, bass, and Elvin Jones, drums) – recorded
virtually the entire album as a series of first takes.
Over the course of the “LP era,” Ellington’s creative process drew consid-
erably on technology. In some sense the recording studio, which had always
been a significant part of his creative practice, served as an increasingly
important workshop to him. If, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, recordings
were one of a set of interlocking technologies that allowed Ellington to
not only make his music, but make his image and his career as a creative
musician, in the 1950s, and after, the new recording technologies grew in
importance. Perhaps the clearest evidence of Ellington’s belief in recording
as a creative endeavor, and in the importance of controlling to whatever
51 Nicholson, Reminiscing, 336.

extent he could the process, is seen in his “private” recordings. Throughout

the LP era, Ellington produced a series of his own recordings, at consider-
able personal expense, many of which were not released until much later.
Working extensively with Billy Strayhorn (whose importance to this work
should not be underestimated), Ellington and his band recorded new and
old pieces, often renting out the major labels’ studios. The attention to
sound, the search for music that would be contemporary and relevant,
and perhaps most of all the drive to make music in the recording studio
under his own control, make these recordings a testament to Ellington’s
enduring “renaissancism.”
Conclusion
The technologies of the LP era offered a number of clear benefits to musi-

cians and audiences, and Ellington took advantage of most of them. To
shed some final light on what he was doing as a recording artist in the
1950s and beyond, and how that work relates to his music before 1950, it is
useful to look at the one potential in the new technology that he did not use
extensively. Magnetic tape offered recording artists, composers, producers,
and engineers – “recordists” in Albin Zak’s terms – both the opportunity
to manipulate recorded sound in far more extensive ways than had any
previous medium (wax, wire, shellac, acetate) and the capacity to create
recordings that held very little direct relationship to the musical activ-
ities used to initially produce the recordings. Postwar musique concrète
composers in France (including Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry) were
some of the first to utilize this aspect of tape technology, and these tech-
niques were taken up in the 1960s to be used extensively by rock recordists,
ultimately becoming so fundamental to rock’s sounds that technologies
had to be developed to recreate non-naturalistic recorded sound in live
performance.52 The jazz-centered uses of such tape techniques have been
quite spare, and almost never foregrounded. I have argued elsewhere, with
regard to modern jazz recording, that an aesthetic of the “real” – or of
52 Zak also notes that the embrace of these techniques was not immediate for rock recordists,
many of whom came initially from the worlds of jazz and R & B (Zak, Poetics, 15). Steve
Waksman argues that in an important way the line that divides blues from rock ’n’ roll might
be seen in the difference between Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry and their relationships to
recording technology. Chuck Berry, the rock and roller, was “recording endemic,” so to speak,
having internalized recording technology as a youth. Steve Waksman, Instruments of Desire:
The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press 2001), 148–9.
222 gabriel solis
the recording as snapshot – prevails, and so much so that musicians like

Lennie Tristano have suffered with critics and fans for using tape effects
as extended techniques.53
That Ellington, who was an “early adopter” of new technologies,
eschewed this one aspect of technologies he was otherwise quick to use
bears notice, particularly inasmuch as it was an aspect that at least some
self-consciously “forward-looking” musicians embraced. At the heart of
this issue is Ellington’s placement within jazz. Essentially every other
aspect of tape, LP, and high-fidelity recording technology served the ends
for which Ellington had already been using recordings, radio, and to
some degree other Machine Age technologies before World War II. They
showed him to be progressive, enhanced his presence for audiences, made
his music cheaper and easier to distribute to wider audiences, conferred a
sense of dignity on his work, and made it easier for him to appear to “be
there” for his audiences. Tape effects were either neutral in this regard –
to the extent that they were opaque to record buyers – or worse, inhibited
his ends, the more transparent they became.
Possibly the most significant change to happen to the music industry
in the LP era was the sheer volume of recording time that became avail-
able to musicians and record labels. Cutting discs in the prewar period
(when recordings were made direct to acetate or other kinds of masters)
was expensive, difficult, and time-consuming. Not only did the LP allow
musicians to record more minutes per disc, the advent of recording to
magnetic tape – which was cheaper, easier, faster, and had great results
– allowed recording companies to produce nearly unlimited hours of
music for a fraction of the cost per minute. Storage was still problem-
atic, and would remain so until the advent of digital recording, but even
so, companies could record multiple albums’ worth of material to tape,
and then tweak, edit, and work with the music after the fact, releasing it
commercially on 45s, EPs, and LPs.
A look at Duke Ellington’s schedule in the period after 1950 shows a
breathtaking level of activity in the studio. In part, this can be explained
by the fact that live radio broadcasts, the “location” gigs that had been a
staple of the band’s life throughout the 1930s and 1940s, were on the wane.
Ellington appeared on television occasionally, but the sound capability of
that format was rudimentary at the time, even as audio recording was
53 Gabriel Solis, “‘A Unique Chunk of Jazz Reality’: Authorship, Musical Work Concepts, and
Thelonious Monk’s Live Recordings from the Five Spot, 1958,” Ethnomusicology 48 (Fall 2004):
341.
leaping ahead in its capacity to produce lifelike sound. If live radio had
remained popular over the second half of the twentieth century, Ellington
might have remained consistently active in that capacity, but in any case
the recording studio offered him kinds of control over his music that
radio did not. What he sacrificed in immediacy he more than made up
in manipulability and permanence. For an artist consistently interested in
African American history and progress – twin legacies of his “Renaissance
education” – the technologies of the LP era (hi-fi sound, stereo recording,
magnetic tape, and the long playing disc) offered a glimpse of the fruits
of progress and the promise of preserving his musical voice for posterity
much more extensively and robustly than had previous technologies. It
comes as no surprise, then, that given the opportunity to record with
increasing regularity, Ellington made so many post-1950 recordings. That
not all of them rise to the level of his work from the late 1920s or the early
1940s may be partly a simple matter of percentages: the more recordings
Ellington and his band made, the more chances that some of them would
be pedestrian. Nevertheless, viewed as a coherent body, they are at least of
historical interest above and beyond the acknowledged masterpieces, like
the 1966 Far East Suite or Such Sweet Thunder. Ellington’s work from the
LP era shows a musician working creatively with emergent technologies,
much as he had with previous technologies, working collaboratively with
a range of others to craft a vision and speak to an expanding audience.
8 Authentic Synthetic Hybrid: Ellington’s Concepts
of Africa and Its Music
carl woideck
In his memoir, Music Is My Mistress, Duke Ellington recalled thinking

upon his arrival in Africa in 1966: “After writing African music for thirty-
five years, here I am at last in Africa! I can only hope and wish that
our performance of ‘La Plus Belle Africaine,’ which I have written in
anticipation of the occasion, will mean something to the people gathered
here.”1
If Ellington was a composer of “African” (as opposed to African Amer-
ican) music, what did Africa mean to Ellington? Given that Ellington
called himself a “student of Negro history,”2 one is led to the question:
what did he study? What were his concepts of Africa as a young profes-
sional musician? And what were his concepts of Africa as an experienced
and world-traveled artist? According to Ellington, not long before he first
visited Africa he told his musicians that a piece “should be executed from
the African philosophical point of view.”3 What did Ellington know of
African philosophy? Moreover, Ellington used the term “authentic” to
describe an African American drummer’s work on a 1960s jungle-themed
piece.4 What did African “authenticity” mean to Ellington? During much
of his career, Ellington often wrote – or claimed he had written – music
that was inspired by specific places in the world. With this in mind, did
he claim that any of his music was inspired by his experiences during his
two visits to Africa (Senegal in 1966; Ethiopia and Zambia in 1973)?
In this chapter, I use these questions as points of departure, focusing
on the period from Ellington’s breakthrough engagement at New York’s
Cotton Club in 1927 to his death in 1974. I examine what evidence and
clues we have regarding his pre- and post-Senegal concepts of Africa,
both from cultural and musical perspectives. Whenever possible, I begin
these examinations with Ellington’s own words and music. When our
knowledge as to his concepts of Africa is incomplete or contradictory
(which it often is), I present the available evidence as such.
In the decades before his African journeys, Ellington wrote many com-
positions whose titles or descriptive programs refer to some aspect of
224 1 Ellington, Mistress, 337. 2 Ibid., 419. 3 Ibid., 243. 4 Ibid.

Authentic Synthetic Hybrid 225
Africa. Some of these are in the so-called jungle style, whose musical char-
acteristics I outline here and identify in some of his early works. However,
Ellington soon discontinued references to the jungle in his titles, and then,
after 1947, discontinued references to Africa in general. Ellington’s con-
ceptions of African music and culture became less theoretical and more
based on observation when he performed for over a week with a Ghanaian
musician in 1957, and his direct knowledge became even more concrete
with the orchestra’s two trips to Africa in 1966 and 1973.
Although these travels to Africa were highly important to him, many
details of these visits are little known and have been only briefly mentioned
in print. For example, neither of the two major Ellington biographies, John
Hasse’s 1995 Beyond Category and Terry Teachout’s 2013 Duke: A Life of
Duke Ellington, mentions his ten days of playing with an African-born
drummer in 1957. Beyond Category has thirty-four words about that just-
mentioned Senegal trip, and fifteen words about Ellington receiving a
medal from Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie on his second African journey, in
1973.5 The more recent Duke has three words about Ellington visiting
“Africa in 1966,” and the two words “Ethiopia” and “Zambia” in men-
tioning the second trip.6
From 1961, Ellington’s compositional titles and programmatic back sto-
ries notably started to include references again to the jungle and Africa. To
remedy the lack of published discussion of these trips, surviving members
of the Ellington bands that traveled to Africa were able to recall for me var-
ious aspects of these tours, including encounters with African musicians
and with Haile Selassie. In this essay, I look for traces of African-inspired
music in a host of these 1961–5 pieces, and examine Ellington’s post-1966
work for possible musical influences from his Senegalese, Ethiopian, and
Zambian experiences. Finally, in light of Ellington’s post-1957 experiences
with African music and musicians, I re-examine his notions of authentic-
ity, and his 1966 assertion that he was a writer of “African music.”
Ellington’s Early Concepts of Africa
We know little of how exactly Duke Ellington’s concepts of Africa were

formed during his childhood in Washington, D.C., but, in that city, family,
community, and public school fostered race pride. In his memoir, Music Is
5 Hasse, Beyond, 370, 377.

6 Terry Teachout, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (New York: Gotham, 2013), 320, 356.
226 carl woideck
My Mistress, Ellington does not discuss his youthful concepts of Africa, or

what he read while living in Washington, though the community offered
many opportunities for exposure to period resources and events that cel-
ebrated African American racial pride and cultural legacy. For instance,
Ellington could have read The Journal of Negro History, which was pub-
lished in Washington. Similarly, while it is not known whether Ellington
attended either event, during his youth the theatrical productions The
Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song and Story and W. E. B. Du Bois’s
pageant The Star of Ethiopia (“10,000 years and more of the Negro race”)
were performed to significant acclaim in Washington.7 A 1915 publication,
presumed to have been written by Du Bois, notes of the latter production:
“The Star of Ethiopia” presents the story of the history and development of the
black race from the prehistoric times down to the present. It is divided into five
Scenes and thirteen Episodes. It begins with the prehistoric black men who gave to
the world the gift of the welding of iron. Ethiopia, Mother of Men, then leads the
mystic processions of historic events past the glory of ancient Egypt, the splendid
kingdoms of the Sudan and Zymbabwe [Zimbabwe] down to the tragedy of the
American slave trade.8
John Howland points out that we must also look beyond Washing-
ton, D.C., for potential “artistic-cultural” influences upon the fledgling
Ellington. For example, the still-young Ellington was already based in
New York when Will Marion Cook’s “dual-purpose historical/variety-
entertainment” show, Negro Nuances, was performed in Harlem in Jan-
uary 1924. According to a “working outline” for the show, the first scene
of the first section (called a “Nuance”) was set in Africa.9 What – if any –
historical research went into that section is not clear. Not surprisingly, we
do not know if Ellington saw this production.
Lengthy discussion of Ellington’s youth is outside the scope of this
essay, but neither his youthful education, nor The Star of Ethiopia, nor
The Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song and Story, nor Negro Nuances
could have fully prepared Ellington for the experience of being asked to
write music for faux-African dance numbers for the revues at New York’s
Cotton Club.
7 Tucker, Early, 7–8, 12. See also David Krasner, “‘The Pageant Is the Thing’: Black Nationalism
and The Star of Ethiopia,” in Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, ed.
Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 106–22.
8 “The Star of Ethiopia,” in W. E. B. Du Bois, Pamphlets and Leaflets, ed. Herbert Aptheker
(White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1986), 162.
9 Howland, Uptown, 115–17.
Ellington and his band began playing at Harlem’s Cotton Club on 4

December 1927, and they were the house band at this venue for long
stretches until 3 February 1931. A floor show at the Cotton Club consisted
of various combinations of dancers, singers, and musicians presenting an
exotic entertainment experience to an often all-white audience. The exoti-
cism came on at least two levels: one was that the white audience members
experienced the novelty of seeing contemporary African Americans (the
artists) in a controlled, and therefore reassuring, environment; the second
was the exotic roles that the singing and dancing acts took on, which
included Bohemians (“Fantasie de Paris”), Arabic figures (“The Splendor
of Arabia”), Spaniards (“Andalusian Nights”), plantation dwellers (“We’re
Goin’ a Pickin’ Cotton”), or Harlem dwellers (“Harlem’s Hot as Hades”).
The most-often noted exotic routines cited in Ellington literature (but not
necessarily the most prevalent at the club) have been the jungle routines.
Few programs from the Harlem era of the Cotton Club have been
reprinted or have circulated among collectors. (The club relocated down-
town to Broadway and 48th Street in 1936.) In those Harlem-era pro-
grams that this author has seen that identify the names of individual stage
routines in the shows, jungle-themed numbers were no more prevalent
than other exotic-themed acts. The most African-specific title is “Congo
Jamboree” (from September 1929) that promises “An exhibition of unre-
strained Nubian abandon.”10
Jazz historian and author Marshall Stearns visited Harlem’s Cotton
Club during Ellington’s tenure and later described one of the venue’s
African-themed routines:
The floor shows at the Cotton Club, which admitted only gangsters, whites, and
Negro celebrities, were an incredible mishmash of talent and nonsense which might
well fascinate both sociologists and psychiatrists. I recall one where a light-skinned
and magnificently muscled Negro burst through a papier-mâché jungle onto the
dance floor, clad in an aviator’s helmet, goggles, and shorts. He had obviously been
“forced down in darkest Africa,” and in the center of the floor he came upon a
“white” goddess clad in long golden tresses and being worshiped by a circle of
cringing “blacks.” Producing a bull whip from heaven knows where, the aviator
rescued the blonde and they did an erotic dance. In the background, Bubber Miley,
Tricky Sam Nanton, and other members of the Ellington Band growled, wheezed,
and snorted obscenely.11

11 Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956; repr., Mentor
Books, 1958), 133.
228 carl woideck
Decades later, Ellington gave a more general description of the Cotton

Club’s African-themed entertainment: “During one period at the Cotton
Club, much attention was paid to acts with an African setting, and to
accompany these we developed what was termed ‘jungle style’ jazz. (As
a student of Negro history I had, in any case, a natural inclination in
this direction.)”12 This “jungle style” became known as “jungle music.”
Ellington’s drummer, William “Sonny” Greer, traced the term to a celebrity
encounter at the Cotton Club. Greer explains, “so they were sitting up at
the Cotton Club and George Gershwin said to Paul [Whiteman], I know
what that is, that’s jungle music.”13 Given the jungle routines described
above though, any number of individuals could have independently come
up with this term.
Ellington never publicly defined jungle music, but in jazz literature, the
most-often recurring musical characteristic discussed is the sound of the
band’s plunger-muted and growling trumpet and trombone that seemed
to pronounce syllables like “wah wah” and “yah yah.” This was a tech-
nique that had been brought into the Ellington band by trumpeter James
“Bubber” Miley and was well displayed on the band’s first recording of
“East St. Louis Toodle-O” (29 November 1926). A minor tonality, as heard
in this number’s opening growl section, is also sometimes associated with
the jungle style. Trombonist Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton likewise mastered
the plunger technique, and by the 3 February 1927 recording of “Song
of the Cotton Field,” growl/plunger trumpet/trombone and a minor tonal-
ity were united in one recording. These pieces, along with 1927’s Black and
Tan Fantasy, were recorded before Ellington began playing at the Cotton
Club.14
Did Ellington essentially just take techniques he was already using and
give them an African association for use at the Cotton Club? Or could
he have begun to associate such growl/plunger brass playing with jungle
skits before his Cotton Club tenure? In this light, can any pre-Cotton Club
Ellington compositions be considered to be Ellingtonian jungle music?
The Cotton Club did not invent African-themed stage acts; in fact,
when Elmer Snowden’s band (the “Washington Black Dot Orchestra”) –
with Ellington as pianist – was featured at New York’s Hollywood Club in

13 William “Sonny” Greer, Jazz Oral History Project interview, January 1979, conducted by
Stanley Crouch, cassette 1, transcript, 33, Institute of Jazz Studies, John Cotton Dana Library,
Rutgers University, Newark, NJ.
14 For more on the development of this sound during the early years of the orchestra, see Tucker,
Early.
1923, a review in the New York Evening Telegram described such an act at
the club:
The revue, which is composed of entirely colored entertainers, is an elaborate one

and withal, mirthful and characteristically musical. Standing out most prominently
is an ensemble number called “Stamboula,” in which a decidedly dusky [dark-
skinned] king (Slick White) leads. Clad in a leopard skin with a “gold” crown on his
head and war club in his hand, the King with his much lighter colored wives (the
chorus) presents a striking picture. White has a very good voice and puts the song
over in very fine style. One of the wives, Anita Rivera, put on a dance which almost
stopped the show. Needless to say she charmed the King.15
When Snowden left the band (already called the Washingtonians) in early
1924, Ellington took over the group and continued to play at the Hol-
lywood Club. Trumpeter Miley soon joined and brought with him the
growl/plunger sound. As Ellington notes of this development, “Our band
changed its character when Bubber came in. He used to growl all night
long, playing gutbucket on his horn. That was when we decided to forget
all about the sweet music.”16 Indeed, both jungle routines and plunger-
muted growl trumpet were present at the Hollywood Club (renamed the
Club Kentucky in 1925) and may have begun to be associated with one
another well before their use at the Cotton Club. If it was performed for
jungle routines at the Hollywood/Kentucky night club, a composition like
Black and Tan Fantasy would indeed qualify as pre-Cotton Club jungle
music.
Ellington’s The Mooche, first recorded in October 1928 (and for four
different record labels in total), has the distinction of being the only
Ellington composition linked to a jungle routine by mention in a known
Cotton Club program. Although it was likely featured at the Cotton Club
around the time of its initial 1928 recordings, the composition’s one
appearance in a program available to me is for a segment in the 1932 show
Rhyth-Mania (Ellington had returned to the Cotton Club for a one-week
engagement). The routine is titled “The Mooche” and features Banana
Girls and a Queen.17 In its recorded arrangement, The Mooche features
wailing clarinets, plunger-muted trumpet, and a minor tonality for a
15 David G. Casem, “News of New York’s Hotels and Popular Restaurants,” The Evening Telegram,
8 September 1923, p. 10. Thanks to Ken Steiner for sharing his research.
16 “Jazz as I Have Seen It,” Swing, June 1940, 11.
17 On Ellington’s engagement, see Stratemann, Day, 50. The program is reproduced on p. 68 of
Horst J. P. Bergmeier’s and Rainier E. Lotz’s liner notes to Live from the Cotton Club, Bear
Family Records BCD 16340 BL, 2003, compact disc boxed set.
230 carl woideck
good part of its length. On the very first recording (1 October 1928 for
Okeh), Sonny Greer can faintly be heard using what sounds like mallets
on his tom-tom drums or tympani at the beginning and end. Similarly,
on the number’s first live recording, Greer is clearly using mallets on
drums.18 Tom-toms are not universally found in the jungle music of jazz,
but for most of the twentieth century, Westerners, including Ellington,
often generically associated tom-toms with the music of African jungles.
Following this association, in Ellington’s unpublished typed program for
the 1943 Black, Brown and Beige, he began:
A message is shot thru the jungle by drums.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Like a tom-tom in steady precision.19
This text is a product of Ellington’s middle years, but early in his career,
what were his conceptions of African music? In 1933, Ellington referred
to “the jazz element, based on primitive jungle rhythms.”20 As this sug-
gests, he was not immune to invoking the popular period notion of jazz
having primitive (as opposed to sophisticated) rhythms that derived from
a generic African jungle. Even though Ellington might have been exposed
to more well-informed concepts of Western African music and culture
in his youth in Washington, D.C. (see above), or through subsequent
possible contact with Harlem Renaissance ideas, the dominant African
cultural tropes in American mass media came from popular sources such
as the Tarzan movies and novels. Although Ellington later claimed to have
been writing “African music” by the early 1930s, he certainly had limited
information on the actual practices of African music to rely on.
In addition, from 1929 through 1931, Ellington’s band was sometimes
credited on record labels as The Jungle Band. On one hand, this name
allowed Ellington to record for both Brunswick (as The Jungle Band)
18 7 November 1940, Fargo, North Dakota. There have been numerous commercial releases of
this famous live recording. See, especially, Duke Ellington, The Duke at Fargo 1940: Special
Sixtieth Anniversary Edition, Storyville 8316, 2001, compact disc.
19 This typescript is held in the Duke Ellington Collection, series 4b, box 3, folder 7.
20 Doran K. Antrum, “After Jazz – What? Is American Music Stymied or Are We Going
Somewhere?,” Metronome, December 1933, 23. The full passage reads: “It is my honest belief
that the musical rhythm known as jazz will never bow out for a full exit. I do feel though, that
its accepted forms are due for radical changes but there will remain in the background the jazz
element, based on primitive jungle rhythms.” In his memoir, Ellington puts a new spin on the
term “jungle” and associates himself with primitivism: “Roaming through the jungle, the
jungle of ‘oos’ and ‘ahs,” searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with
the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats.” Ellington, Mistress, 447.
and for Victor (under his own name, often as Duke Ellington and His
Cotton Club Orchestra) contemporaneously. But, on the other hand,
this alias acknowledged that his band was associated with the Cotton
Club’s famous jungle routines. This shrewd billing was likely the work of
Ellington’s manager Irving Mills, not Ellington. On a 1929 recording, Mills
referred to Ellington as “the greatest living master of jungle music.”21 Also
in 1929, “jungle” began to appear in a few titles recorded by Ellington,
such as “Jungle Jamboree,” “Jungle Blues,” “Jungle Nights in Harlem,”
and “Echoes of the Jungle.” That said, only “Jungle Nights in Harlem” was
written by Ellington. And after he left the Cotton Club in 1931, Ellington
showed little interest in the term “jungle”; the next Ellington piece to have
the word in its title was “Air Conditioned Jungle” (co-composed with
Jimmy Hamilton) in 1944.
Even as Ellington’s recordings less often used jungle titles in the 1930s
and early 1940s, the Cotton Club retained a close association with the
theme of the exotic jungle. Even after 1936, when the club moved down-
town from Harlem to Broadway at 48th St. (thereby losing its potential for
tourists’ Harlem slumming), it continued to identify itself with African
primitivism. English critic and diarist James Agate visited the latter-day
Cotton Club during a May 1937 Ellington residency and later described
the exotic show:
Wound up the evening at the Cotton Club. This is the place to hear swing music as
the negroes like it. What I personally think about it doesn’t matter; it stirs American
audiences to frenzy. Duke Ellington conducts, presuming conducting is the word.
A first-class cabaret follows. This takes place in a purplish penumbra, in which the
dancers, naked except for diamond girdle and breastplate, are a twilit salmon-pink.
They are extraordinarily attractive.22
A Cotton Club program from a March 1938 Ellington engagement notably

has a cover painting that depicts naked Africans at the edge of a jungle,
dancing and playing a drum. The males have darker skin colors than the
females, and each character’s genitals are cleverly covered.23
21 Duke Ellington, “A Night at the Cotton Club,” Victor 741029 (rec. 12 April 1929), 78 rpm;
reissued on Duke Ellington, The Centennial Edition: The Complete RCA Victor Recordings,
1927–1973, RCA 63386, 1999, compact disc boxed set.
22 James Agate, Ego 3: Being Still More of the Autobiography of James Agate (London: George G.
Harrap, 1938), 113. Terry Teachout posted this passage to the Jazz Research List
(jazz-research@yahoogroups.com) on 4 January 2012 (although without the book title and
page being cited).
23 Cover art signed by Julian Harrison. From the author’s personal collection.
232 carl woideck
The Idea of Africa and Ellington’s Middle Years
As early as 1930, Ellington planned to write a composition titled “The His-

tory of the Negro,” that would include musical references to Africa.24 As we
have seen earlier in this chapter, performance works with African/African
American historical objectives such as The Evolution of the Negro in Pic-
ture, Song and Story, The Star of Ethiopia, and Negro Nuances preceded
Ellington’s plans. In 1933, Ellington spoke of intending to write a “suite in
five parts” whose first section was to be titled “Africa.”25 By 1941, he was
planning to create a four-part work and had settled on a mythic character,
Boola, to symbolize Africans/African Americans over time. He remarked:
“My opera traces Boola’s whole history in four scenes. The first scene is
laid in Africa. The music there is mostly imaginary, because no one today
knows what African Negro music was like in the days of the early slave
traders.” At this time, the entire work was said to be titled Boola.26 By 1943,
however, when he premiered his 43-minute concert work Black, Brown
and Beige, none of the major sections – now three – was primarily set in
Africa. (By comparison, the first scene of Negro Nuances was entirely set
in Africa and was projected to run ten to twelve-and-a-half minutes.27 )
One musical element of Black, Brown and Beige that does hearken back
to the previously planned African section is heard at the very beginning
of the work, with quarter notes played by drummer Sonny Greer on his
tom-toms (“A message is shot through the jungle by drums,” as Elling-
ton wrote in his unpublished, typed program).28 By 1943, Ellington likely
knew more about African history than he had during his early Cotton
Club days, so why did he so radically scale back the previously proposed
Africa-based scene of his “History of the Negro?” It could have been for
lack of very specific knowledge of Western African music at the time of
the slave trade. If that was indeed Ellington’s reason, it would be a bit
surprising, because, as we will see, creating “imaginary” African music
would not be a problem for him in the future.
Although Black, Brown and Beige’s musical references to Africa are lim-
ited, Ellington’s written supporting material does offer clues to the depth
24 Florence Zunser, “‘Opera Must Die,’ Says Galli-Curci! Long Live the Blues!,” New York Evening
Graphic Magazine, 27 December 1930, n. p.; reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 45.
25 Wilder Hobson, “Introducing Duke Ellington,” Fortune, August 1933, 47–8, 90, 94–5;
reprinted in Tucker, Reader, 98.
26 Alfred Frankenstein, “‘Hot Is Something about a Tree,’ Says Ellington,” San Francisco
Chronicle, 9 November 1941, n. p.; cited in Tucker, “Genesis,” 75.
27 Howland, Uptown, 116. 28 Duke Ellington Collection, series 4b, box 3, folder 7.
of his knowledge of African history by the early 1940s. In his unpublished,

typed program for the work, Ellington refers to historical Egypt (“Seeds
of the first civilization/Known to man!”), Babylon (“Knowing well her
culture sprang/From black men”), the Nile “Meroe [or Meroë] . . . /From
whence the first bright light flamed up/In Ethiopia to guide mankind
along the way”), and South Africa (“The Bantus in South Africa”). After
a discussion of the Sudan (“First to smelt the iron and use the forge”),
Ellington asks “How many scholars know the ‘Epic of the Sudan,’/To mea-
sure the classics of any land?”29 “Epic of the Sudan” is a reference to the
Tarikh es Sudan (or Tarikh-es-Sudan), written in 1596 by Abdurrahman
Es-Sadi or perhaps several authors.30
These passages, and similar ones elsewhere in the typescript, offer our
clearest early traces of Ellington as a “student of Negro history.” Elling-
ton could easily have learned about African history through discussions
with various knowledgeable individuals, but we do not know specifically
which books or journals he read on the subject. It is possible, however,
to make some informed guesses about his possible awareness of the more
widely circulated sources that address the ideas and historical references
he mentions. For instance, one likely source for knowledge about the Epic
of the Sudan/Tarikh es Sudan can be found in a passing reference in W.
E. B. Du Bois’s The Negro, published in 1915.31 Another possible source,
interestingly enough, was a journal that Ellington could have encountered
in Washington, D.C., even before leaving for New York City in 1923. The
Journal of Negro History was co-published in Washington, D.C., and Lan-
caster, Pennsylvania. In the journal’s July 1921 issue, there appeared an
article by William Leo Hansberry titled “The Material Culture of Ancient
Nigeria.” This article notably discusses the Epic of the Sudan/Tarikh es
Sudan a bit more specifically than Du Bois had six years earlier.32
Harvey G. Cohen has found similarities between a passage in Elling-
ton’s typed program and a quotation of Franz Boas found in Du Bois’s
The Negro.33 He has also noted parallels between the typescript and Du
Bois’s The Star of Ethiopia, which, as discussed earlier, Ellington could
have seen performed during his youth in Washington, D.C. Cohen sug-
gests “Ellington’s references to the smelting of iron, the notion of slavery
29 Ibid.
30 John G. Jackson, Introduction to African Civilizations (New York: Citadel, 2001), 196.
31 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (orig. 1915; repr. Radford, VA: A & D Publishing, 2008), 63.
32 William Leo Hansberry, “The Material Culture of Ancient Nigeria,” The Journal of Negro
History 6 (July 1921): 263–4.
33 Cohen, America, 214–15.
234 carl woideck
strengthening the resiliency and character of blacks, historians’ general

ignorance of African and African American history, and the inclusion of
Toussaint L’ouverture [L’Ouverture] and slave-revolt leaders as an essen-
tial part of African American history is echoed in Du Bois’s 1910 pageant
The Star of Ethiopia.”34 Not long after the premiere of Black, Brown and
Beige, Maurice Zolotow reported that Ellington had amassed “a collec-
tion of eight hundred well-read books on Negro history and prehistorical
[prehistoric] African Art.”35
During the same period, Richard O. Boyer interviewed Ellington and
wrote:
Duke sometimes thinks that it is good business to conceal his interest in the Bible,
just as he conceals his interest in American Negro history. He doubts if it adds to
his popularity in Arkansas, say, to have it known that in books he has read about
Negro slave revolts he has heavily underlined paragraphs about the exploits of Nat
Turner and Denmark Vesey . . . New acquaintances are always surprised when they
learn that Duke has written poetry in which he advances the thesis that the rhythm
of jazz has been beaten into the Negro race by three centuries of oppression. The
four beats to a bar in jazz are also found, he maintains in verse, in the Negro pulse.
Duke doesn’t like to show people his poetry. “You can say anything you want on the
trombone, but you gotta be careful with words,” he explains.36
Unfortunately, neither The Journal of Negro History, nor Du Bois’s The

Negro, nor books about Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, nor any books
about African history are among Ellington’s former possessions housed in
the Duke Ellington or Ruth Ellington archives at the Smithsonian National
Museum of American History.37 All of these leads are enticing, and give
us a sense of what written sources Ellington had at his disposal, if he had
chosen to avail himself of them. He was a “student of Negro history” with
hundreds of books on the subject, but he left only small clues as to his
reading habits of the time, perhaps because “you gotta be careful with
words.”
34 Ibid., 609n23. Cohen based his observations on Krasner, “Pageant Is the Thing.”
35 Maurice Zolotow, “The Duke of Hot,” in Never Whistle in a Dressing Room (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1944), 302. This essay was originally published in the Saturday Evening Post, 7 August
1943, n.p. Duke Ellington’s granddaughter, Mercedes Ellington, told me that she had never
seen any such African book collection (even remotely similar in size) in Ellington’s possession.
Personal communication, 14 May 2014.
36 Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach – III,” New Yorker, 8 July 1944, 26, 27.
37 The three Ellington-owned books in the archive that are closest to this article’s focus are
Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery (1903), Charlotte and Wolf Leslau’s African Proverbs
(1962), and Ethiopian artist Afewerk Tekle’s Afewerk Tekle (1973).
One of Ellington’s most direct creative expressions of interest in Africa

in this period was first heard at the 1947 Carnegie Hall concert, where
he premiered his Liberian Suite, commissioned by the Liberian govern-
ment. Ellington certainly knew about Liberia’s unique relationship to the
United States, and likely much more. In his memoir, Ellington described
the work: “In form, it consisted of an introduction, ‘I Like the Sun-
rise,’ dramatically sung by Al Hibbler, and five contrasting dances, whose
moods and rhythms were related to what I knew of the Liberian past
and present.”38 Note that Ellington does not say that his suite’s rhythms
were based on Liberian rhythms, but that his music’s moods and rhythms
were related to his knowledge of Liberian history. Significantly for an
African-themed composition, on a live recording from the premiere con-
cert, Sonny Greer is featured playing mallets on tom-toms and/or tim-
pani on four of the five dances, and the last dance unites Greer’s mal-
lets with wah-wah (and occasional growl) trombone from Tyree Glenn.
Also played at the 1947 Carnegie Hall concert were two Ellington pieces
that are associated with the jungle style: East St. Louis Toodle-O and
Black and Tan Fantasy. Not surprisingly, Greer again uses mallets on his
drums in jungle-style gestures. After the Liberian Suite, the next Elling-
ton composition (as far as I can determine) whose title explicitly refers
to Africa is “Cong-go,” which was recorded well over a decade later, in
1961.
From September to December 1956, Ellington recorded the music
for his music-dance-acting-singing television spectacular A Drum Is a
Woman, which was broadcast in 1957. Like Black, Brown and Beige, A
Drum Is a Woman makes only a brief reference to the continent of Africa.
For example, in the song “Rhythm Pum Te Dum” it is said, “Rhythm came
to America from Africa . . . Africa to the West Indies.”39 Beyond that, the
recording of the show is set everywhere from New Orleans’s Congo Square
to a flying saucer in the skies.
In 1957 came what was Ellington’s first chance to play for an extended
period with an African-born musician, drummer/percussionist Guy War-
ren. Born Kpakpo Akwei in the British African colony Gold Coast (from
1957, Ghana), he used the name Guy Warren in the middle of his career,
and Kofi Ghanaba later. Warren had been based in Chicago since approx-
imately 1955. For an engagement at Chicago’s Blue Note night club from
10 to 21 July 1957, Warren played with Ellington, reportedly substituting

39 Duke Ellington, A Drum Is a Woman, Columbia CL 951, 1957, LP.
236 carl woideck
for Sam Woodyard on drum set.40 On 12 July, this band was recorded
as it broadcast three selections on radio.41 The drummer acquits himself
well and is particularly prominent on “Rock City Rock,” where he plays
many accents and fills. If this is indeed Warren (and the aggressive drum
fills and accents are unlike Woodyard’s on Ellington’s earlier 1957 studio
recording), he seems to understand the conventions of showy big band
drumming.
Around this time, Warren was also playing in Billy Strayhorn’s trio at
the Blue Note.42 (The trio began at the club a week before Ellington’s
band started, and may have continued to play opposite Ellington during
the big band’s engagement.) Ellington attended a Strayhorn trio rehearsal
in which Warren played an African talking drum on The Mooche, thus
bringing an actual African instrument to Ellington’s jungle music. The
occasion was described by Warren:
And Billy Strayhorn. We had a trio going, substituting for the big band – that’s what
it was, you see – Billy Strayhorn on piano, myself on drums, and somebody else on
bass; and Duke would come and supervise rehearsals, you see. We used to spotlight
my Talking Drum in “The Mooche,” and whenever I did a break on my drum, he
would say “No, no Guy – do it this way” – the other way, you see – so I would say,
“Oh – like this?” and I would do it his way – But, I would then go again into my solo,
and end up doing my break! So he thought I was putting him on or something –
but I just couldn’t feel it his way! I knew his jazz, but he did not know mine, and I
did not intend to play his jazz for mine! 43
Warren asserts that he understood Ellington’s music (a notion reinforced

by his appropriate big band drumming on “Rock City Rock” above),
but Ellington did not meet Warren half way by accepting some of War-
ren’s Ghanaian drum traditions. Ellington did not mention Warren in his
memoir, perhaps because of contentiousness in their relationship and/or

41 Many thanks to the ever-generous Ellington expert Sjef Hoesmit for sending me these three
selections.
42 “Eli’s Chosen Six and comic-philosopher Mort Sahl are winding up a Blue Note booking. The
Billy Strayhorn Trio and singer Lurlean Hunter follow for the July 3–7 period. The Duke
Ellington band, with drummer Guy Warren added, will be at the Note for a pair of weeks
beginning July 10.” From “Strictly Ad Lib: Chicago – Jazz Chicago-Style,” Down Beat, 11 July
1957, 8.
43 From a tape-recorded interview with Les Tomkins, London, June 1962. In Guy Warren, I Have
a Story to Tell (Accra: New Guinea Press, 1962), 176–7. All capitalization, boldface, and
punctuation are from the original. It is not clear what “substituting for the big band” means;
they may have played during intermissions between Ellington big band sets, or this may refer to
the fact that Strayhorn’s trio began their engagement at the Blue Note one week before the
Ellington big band.
perhaps because their musical encounter was not particularly memorable

to Ellington. This is not the place to address the two musicians’ artis-
tic or personality differences (in his book, Warren devotes notable space
to discussing individuals who had wronged or failed to support him).
In any case, when Warren was playing with the big band, Ellington of
course had ultimate artistic judgment on how to deal with Warren’s West
African-derived musical ideas. In the case of Strayhorn’s trio, Ellington
perhaps overstepped his interest as the piece’s composer by asserting how
he wanted this version of The Mooche to sound, and what he wanted
Warren to contribute to it.
Despite the above artistic conflict, was Ellington subsequently influ-
enced by the musical concepts of this African drummer? Years later Elling-
ton described his preferred way of dealing with influences from other
cultures: “You let it roll around, undergo a chemical change, and then
seep out on paper.”44 Did performing for approximately ten days with
an African drummer lead over time to a “chemical change” that seeped
into Ellington’s compositions? I have not detected any specific effect upon
his recordings of the following period, nor have I found any references to
the experience in statements by Ellington. However, Ellington’s process of
“chemical change” was often elusive, and looking in his music for direct
influences from his personal experiences is not always fruitful.
Invitation to Africa
Although the now-legendary Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres

took place in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, it was by one account announced
and postponed three times (1961, 1963, 1965) before the event was suc-
cessfully held.45 It is not clear when Ellington was first invited to perform
at the festival, but the offer could have come as early as 1961. That year
would neatly coincide with a sudden resurgence in African-themed titles
in Ellington compositions. Although perhaps his last composition whose
44 Duke Ellington, “Orientations: Adventures in the Mid-East,” Music Journal, March 1964, 35.
45 Aboubacar Demba Cissokho, “Il y a 40 ans, Dakar accueillait le Premier Festival mondial des
Arts Nègres,” Agence de Presse Sénégalese, available online at www.aps.sn/articles.php?id
article=17525 (accessed 6 October 2012). “Dakar, 31 mars (APS) – Il y a 40 ans, du 1-er au 24
avril, se tenait à Dakar le Premier Festival mondial des Arts nègres, lequel, reporté à trois
reprises (1961, 1963, 1965), se tient finalement au moment où le Sénégal fêtait ses six ans
d’indépendance.” The Dakar festival in part grew out of the Congress of Black Writers and
Artists (Paris, 1956) and the second such congress (Rome, 1959). Léopold Sédar Senghor,
President of Senegal, attended both.
238 carl woideck
title referred to Africa had been 1947’s Liberian Suite, the 1960s brought
Ellington pieces such as “Cong-Go” (1961), “Springtime in Africa” (1961),
“Birdie Jungle” (1961), “Money Jungle” (1962), “La Fleurette Africaine”
(1962), “Afro-Bossa” (1963), “After Bird Jungle” (1963), “Jungle Trian-
gle” (1963), “Jungle Kitty” (1965), “Virgin Jungle” (1965), and “La Plus
Belle Africaine” (1966). Given Ellington’s great imagination in naming his
compositions, some of these may have no connection with Africa beyond
their titles. Nevertheless, Ellington specifically commented on the African
connections for at least two of these pieces, “La Fleurette Africaine” (dis-
cussed here) and “La Plus Belle Africaine” (mentioned at the beginning
of this chapter and discussed below).
In his memoir, Ellington wrote of the 1962 recording of “La Fleurette
Africaine” with bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach. For the
piece, he had a jungle image in mind:
One of the numbers recorded was approached something like this: I announced
the key signature and continued into the annotation. “La Fleurette Africaine,” I
explained, “is a little African Flower. The piece should be executed from the African
philosophical point of view, with which it is concerned. The jungle, to Africans,
is a place deep in the forest where no human being has ever ventured, and this
little flower was growing in the middle of it, miles away from human eyes in the
central part of the jungle that is God-made and untouched. The little flower just
grew prettier and prettier every day.”46
Of course, Ellington’s statement of what the jungle means to Africans

(which Africans?) was in large part a colorful story that he was creating
(or embellishing from another source) with great poetic license.
Of the performance/recording that followed his jungle “annotation,”
Ellington wrote: “Roach’s rhythmic embellishments could not have been
more fitting, nor have sounded more authentic.”47 To Ellington, an
American-born musician and self-described writer of African music, what
constituted authenticity? As we have seen, African authenticity was not
paramount to Ellington when he coached Guy Warren; Ellington’s own
artistic vision was his concern. On this recording, Roach’s drumming was
certainly not “authentic” African music, nor was it intended to be.
Roach, of course, knew Ellington’s music and had previously substituted
for drummer Sonny Greer in Ellington’s band in the early 1940s.48 Roach’s
46 Ellington, Mistress, 243. 47 Ibid.

48 As quoted in Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, “Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz with Max
Roach,” orig. broadcast Fall 1998, available online at http://www.npr.org/2008/02/22/
19269815/drumming-legend-max-roach-on-piano-jazz (accessed 14 January 2017). Roach
says that this happened while he was in high school.
“embellishments” on “La Fleurette Africaine” employ mallets on tom-

toms; he does not use his cymbals and never plays swing patterns. It is
possible that when Roach heard Ellington’s verbal jungle imagery while on
this 1962 recording date, he used mallets on his tom-toms because of their
association with Ellington’s previous jungle music as much as because
of Roach’s first-hand knowledge of African music. If Roach’s playing on
this recording was in some sense “authentic,” it might be called authentic
Ellington African music.
However, Roach’s drumming in this era was informed in part by African
traditions. Roach recalled playing with African and Afro-Cuban percus-
sionists as early as 1947 in “a concert with just Dizzy and Charlie Parker
at the hotel Diplomat, right across the street from Town Hall in New York
City. We played with a group of African drummers that was visiting the
United States. It was just Dizzy, Charlie Parker, and myself and about six
or seven drummers. No piano, no bass or anything.”49 Roach’s encounters
with African musicians continued in the 1950s with Guy Warren. Interest-
ingly, Ellington and Roach had Warren in common as a source for African
musical practices. In 1974, Roach recalled Warren enthusiastically: “I met
Ghanaba [Guy Warren] in Chicago in 1956 . . . Ghanaba was so far ahead
of what we were all doing, that none of us understood what he was saying –
that in order for Afro-American music to be stronger, it must cross-fertilize
with its African origins.”50 Another major encounter between Roach and
African percussionists came in 1960, when he recorded his LP Freedom
Now Suite, an album that in part featured Nigerian-born percussionist
Babatunde (Michael) Olatunji.51 Writing about the track “All Africa,” Nat
49 Max Roach, in Dizzy Gillespie and Al Frazier, To Be, or Not . . . to Bop (New York: Da Capo,
1985), 233. A news item in the New York Amsterdam News reported on the event: “The African
Academy of Arts and Research presented Asadata Dafora in ‘African Interlude,’ a program of
music and dance at the Hotel Diplomat, 11 West 43d Street, on Wednesday night, 7 May.
Dafora, a noted exponent of African dance from Sierra Leone, has just returned from a
reportedly successful nationwide tour, and is probably best known for his dance dramas of
several years ago, ‘Kykunker’ and ‘Zunguru.’ One of the more popular presentation[s] of the
affair was the ‘Bombastic “Be-Bop”’ featuring Dizzy ‘Bebop’ Gillespie, standing above, who
was assisted by Bill [Billy] Alvarez, Pepe [Pepé Becké], [Eladio] Gonzales, Diego [Iborra],
Ralph [Raphael Mora], Max Roach, and Charlie Parker.” “Bombastic Bebop,” New York
Amsterdam News, 17 May 1947, n. p., which is reproduced on p. 67 of Jordi Pujol’s liner notes
to Chan Pozo, Chano Pozo: El tambor de Cuba, Tumbau TCD305, 2001, compact disc boxed set.
50 Max Roach, as quoted in Ian Carr, “Max Roach,” in Ian Carr, Digby Fairweather, Brian
Priestley, and Charles Alexander, The Rough Guide to Jazz, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Rough
Guides, 2004), 288. This quote is said to be from 1974. The passage continues, “We ignored
him. Seventeen years later, Black Music in America has turned to Africa for inspiration and
rejuvenation, and the African sound of Ghanaba is now being imitated all over the United
States.”
51 Max Roach, We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, Candid 79002, 1997, compact disc.
Selections with Olatunji recorded 6 September 1960.
240 carl woideck
Hentoff reported that “it was Olatunji who set the polyrhythmic direc-
tions . . . His is also the leading drum voice.”52
Because Ellington respected Roach and praised his “authenticity,” it
is appropriate to compare the two musicians’ relationships to African
music and musicians. From the above statement, we know that Roach
actively collaborated with Olatunji and encouraged his musical input.
We know that Ellington did not pursue further collaboration with Guy
Warren (perhaps because of personality conflicts or artistic differences);
but, significantly, Ellington did not move on from that failed attempt
and try to actively pursue musical collaboration with any other African
musician.
In Zurich in 1962, Ellington met the South African pianist Abdullah
Ibrahim, who was then known professionally as Dollar Brand (and born
Adolph Johannes Brand). Although they did not collaborate on a project,
Ellington arranged for Brand to record, and in 1966, Brand even filled
in for Ellington on several engagements: “I did five dates substituting for
him. It was exciting but very scary, I could hardly play.”53 It is not clear
what Ellington might have learned from Brand about African cultures and
music; conversely, Brand took a reverential approach to Ellington: “Duke
Ellington was symbolic of music for us in South Africa, I guess through
all of Africa . . . he was not an American musician. We never regarded
him as an American; Ellington was just the wise old man in the village,
the extended village.” He also noted, “The meeting with Ellington was
just . . . you ask for confirmation, not with music, but of the path, the Tao.
There are formulas that have to be confirmed, and the only way you can
confirm it is to ask the elders.”54
On 5 January 1963, Ellington recorded in the studio a new composition
that early on was called “Boola” or “Bula.” Boola was, as mentioned, the
name of the symbolic African/African American character who appeared
repeatedly in the program for the 1943 Black, Brown and Beige. How
Ellington connected this later piece to the earlier script character of Boola
is unknown. When Ellington performed the number in concert on 1
February 1963, he introduced it by saying: “I’d like to do now a sort
52 Nat Hentoff, liner notes to Roach, Freedom Now Suite.

53 “Biography,” Abdullah Ibrahim official website, www.abdullahibrahim.com/htmls/features/
biography.html (accessed 13 November 2010).
54 Interview between Abdullah Ibrahim and Karen Bennett. I thank Bennett for her unedited
transcript of these passages (email communication, 13 November 2010). An edited version of
this interview appeared in Karen Bennett, “An Interview with Abdullah Ibrahim,” Musician,
March 1990, 41.
of gutbucket bolero, in a primitive rhythm, executed in a pre-primitive

manner. It’s called ‘Boola.’”55 In 1933, Ellington had used the phrase
“primitive jungle rhythms” when speaking of jazz (see above); by 1963, his
use of the terms “primitive” and “pre-primitive” was of course slyly ironic.
By the time that the 5 January studio version was issued, “Boola” had been
re-titled “Afro-Bossa.”56 The change in title superficially connected the
composition to the bossa nova music that was then becoming popular in
the United States, but in stage announcements after the title had changed,
he clearly pronounced “bossa” as BOE-sa,” and indeed the piece uses
a bolero pattern from the drums, not a bossa nova beat. “Afro-Bossa”
does not attempt to be “authentic” bossa nova, and its association with
Ellington’s African/African American figure Boola has been dropped.
“La Plus Belle Africaine”
From late January to late February 1966, Ellington and his band under-
took a lengthy tour of Europe and England. A few days into the tour,
he premiered the composition “La Plus Belle Africaine.” After their later
return from Africa, the composer often announced in concert that the
piece had been written in anticipation of the trip to Senegal, but Ellington
scholar Sjef Hoefsmit reported that in none of eighteen pre-Senegal live
recordings of the piece that he surveyed does Ellington mention com-
posing the piece in connection with their imminent African journey.57
No studio recording of the composition has been released to date, but a
few live performances from soon after the African trip were commercially
recorded with Ellington’s approval and have been issued.58 He continued
to perform the piece for years to come.
Although the formal details in its performance varied over time, “La
Plus Belle Africaine” is divided into two harmonic sections. One features a
forte part in which the band plays a unison melody (based on what is now
called the blues scale) over a static E-flat minor tonality. The other section
55 Duke Ellington, The Great Paris Concert, Atlantic Jazz 304–2, 2005, compact disc. This track
was recorded 1 February 1963. On this release’s packaging, the title is spelled “Bula,” although
“Boola” is probably what Ellington had in mind, given Ellington’s use of the name in Black,
Brown and Beige.
56 Duke Ellington, Afro-Bossa, Collectibles 6730, 2005, compact disc.
57 Sjef Hoefsmit, email communication to author, 11 August 2010.
58 For example, The Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington Côte d’Azur Concerts on Verve, Verve 314
539 033–2, 1998 (compact disc boxed set), has three versions of “La Plus Belle Africaine” from
July 1966.
242 carl woideck
is gentler and is based around an E-flat Mixolydian (E7) tonality, and

has both a harmonically static section and a moving chord progression
that departs from and returns to E-flat. In all four of the commercially
issued 1966 recordings of the piece,59 drummer Sam Woodyard opens and
closes the number by playing quietly with his hands on his drums and
with his hi-hat cymbals on beats two and four. In the forte passages he
plays powerfully with sticks on his tom-toms and cymbals.
What about the conception of “La Plus Belle Africaine” symbolized
Africa to Ellington? Certainly, at no time does the arrangement employ
swing roles for the rhythm section, nor do the melodic passages involve
swing phrasing, and large parts of the number do not employ moving
chord progressions and/or functional harmony. For Ellington, perhaps
the piece’s lack of those techniques was sufficient to suggest an African
woman. “La Plus Belle Africaine” has a connection to Cotton Club-era
“jungle music” and to the opening of Black, Brown and Beige in that
it features prominent tom-toms. It also looks forward to post-Senegal
Ellington compositions like “Afrique” and “Right On Togo” in that long
sections are based on one scale or one chord.
Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres
In the literature on Ellington, few specifics have been given on Ellington’s

participation at the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, held in
Dakar, Senegal, 1–24 April 1966. This extended immersion in Dakar sug-
gests a key moment in Ellington’s growing knowledge of African musical
culture. However, there is question as to how many times they performed,
which pieces they played at which occasion, and most importantly: what
demonstrable effect – if any – did the festival have on Ellingon.
The festival was hosted by Senegal and its president, the poet, philoso-
pher and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor. Senghor had already written
of Ellington in a poem:
The impatient fit leaves me. Oh! the dull beat of the rain on the leaves!
Just play me your “Solitude”, Duke, till I cry myself to sleep.60
59 The three versions cited directly above, plus Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald: Live at the
Greek, Status DST 1013, 1994, compact disc.
60 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Ndéssé” or “Blues,” in The Collected Poetry, trans. Melvin Dixon
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991), 15. The poem was originally published in
Senghor’s 1945 book, Shadow Song (Chants d’ombre).
Figure 8.1 Duke Ellington and the Senegalese poet, philosopher, and statesman
Léopold Sédar Senghor, April 1966. Ruth Ellington Collection, Archives Center,
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
While at the festival, Ellington encountered Senghor at a performance

(Figure 8.1), and the two reportedly later met for thirty minutes on 8
April 1966.61
The festival brought together artists from Africa and countries of the
African diaspora. From Africa, the festival’s program lists performing
groups from Mali, Nigeria, Burundi, Senegal, Nigeria, Zambia, Togo,
Congo, Ivory Coast, Libya, Uganda, Gabon, Ghana, Ethiopia, Morocco,
Upper Volta, Dahomey, Cameroon, and more. From non-African coun-
tries, it lists performances of artists from the U.S.A., France, Trinidad,
Tobago, Jamaica, Brazil, and Haiti. That said, not all of the individual par-
ticipants listed in the book-length pre-festival program actually appeared.
(For example, singer Ella Fitzgerald did not perform at the festival although
she was pictured and written about in the festival’s program.)62
Visual artists exhibited their works, and writers also participated. There
were juried cinema and literature competitions, and nearly every evening
there was some sort of elaborate show (“spectacle féerique”) on the Île de
61 Cohen, America, 503, 653n19. Based on United States State Department documents.
62 Unsigned, Premier festival mondial des arts nègres (Dakar: n.p., 1966), 81.
244 carl woideck
Gorée, a symbol of the former slave trade, just off the coast of Dakar. The
festival was thus a relatively high-profile international event and noted
intellectuals, government representatives, and arts officials from many
countries were present.
While in Senegal, Ellington spoke to the press and was recorded answer-
ing questions at least once, and perhaps more times. He answered an inter-
viewer’s query “Do you think that this festival is very important for all the
Negro art[ists] of the world?” by saying, “I think so. Definitely. I’m gonna
be very happy to know a lot more about the Negro artists internationally.
It’s gonna be very instructive, and I think will help all artists to adjust their
perspective to the future.”63 To another question, he commented, “We
have accepted the fact that jazz [is] an African export.” (Ellington was of
course highlighting the African-derived aspects of jazz and not focusing
on jazz’s use of European instruments and European-related harmonic
concepts.) During the same press conference, he was asked the meaning
of Senghor’s term “négritude”:
This is the word that I hear. I’m not sure I know what it means. Other than it implies –
which of course would be true, if it’s supposed to imply – that the foundation of
all the music that is being heard today at such a popular level is founded – or the
foundation of this music is – African, or Negro . . . I think Négritude has to do
with the actual Negroes around the world who are contributing to art on a certain
level.64
He told an interviewer that although it was his first trip to of Africa, “Of
course, I’ve dreamt of it so much, and written so much pseudo African
music. Because, at my distance, of course, it would have to be imitation.”65
Around the same time, Ellington said much the same to a print reporter
who filed a story with the Associated Press: “I’m really happy to have the
opportunity to be here. I’ve been writing this pseudo-African music for
the past 35 years. Now I’ll be happy to know a lot more about what the
music sounds like over here.”66 One example of Ellington hearing “what
the music sounds like” is documented in a photo that shows him closely
63 Unknown interviewer, “Duke Ellington, Arrivée à Dakar.” Recorded 1 April 1966. Institut
national de l’audiovisuel (France), item PHD86071223.
64 Ibid.
65 Unknown interviewer, “Festival des arts nègres de Dakar: Le jazz et l’Afrique.’ Recorded 1 April
1966. Institut national de l’audiovisuel (France), item PHD86001587.
66 Unsigned Associated Press wire story; one version of this article was published in The Times of
Corpus Christi, Texas on 2 April 1966, n. p., from the microfilmed Duke Ellington scrapbooks
of the Duke Ellington Collection series 8, Scrapbooks 1931–1973, microfilm roll 8.
observing a Senegalese musician playing a kora.67 While these references

to “pseudo African music” sound like the Ellington of 1941 who said that
his musical depictions of Africa were of necessity “imaginary,” Ellington
soon dropped the qualifying “pseudo” in related subsequent statements,
as is shown below.
I have found no evidence to suggest that Ellington ever left the Dakar
area while in Senegal, but perhaps he saw from his airplane an actual
African jungle of the sort that he had long referred to in his music. If
he carried any simplistic preconceptions about African daily life, art, and
culture, they would have been dispelled by the range of experiences to be
had at the festival. As Judith Jamison, member of the participating Alvin
Ailey American Dance Theatre, recalled years later, being in Senegal was
her “first realization that Tarzan wasn’t it. I said, ‘Oh, that’s what’s going
on in Africa!’”68
One of Ellington’s trombonists, George “Buster” Cooper, remembered
a feeling of familiarity as he encountered in Senegal both Africans and
individuals from the African diaspora:
When I came back [from Dakar], I told my wife, I said, I can see the customs [among
African Americans] different because mothers [seen in Dakar] carry their babies on
their hip, just like they do, like, here in my home town, right here, you now, right
now, you understand what I’m saying? . . . I mean, [it was] as if I was back in the
States . . . and I saw [in Dakar] all the same customs that I was raised up with . . . Just
like the black women [in Dakar], instead of raking the backyard, because there’s
no grass back there, you know like that, but they would sweep ’em, and I’d see my
mother do the same thing [in?] the house back yard . . . [I]t was the same customs.69
The Ellington band’s Sunday, 3 April, performance at the U.S. embassy

and Monday, 4 April, performance at the Théâtre Daniel Sorano were
reviewed by Ebongué Soellé for the newspaper Dakar-Matin. This account
was translated into English by the Foreign Service of the U.S. government:
Since his arrival at the First World Festival of Negro Arts Duke Ellington and his
orchestra have gone from one triumph to another.
Last Sunday during a reception that the United States Ambassador and Mrs. Mer-
cer Cook gave in his honor, he succeeded in making the VIPs lose their seriousness.
67 “The Master Watches,” Jet, 21 April 1966, 32. Photo by Moneta Sleet Jr.
68 Suki John, “Millennial Triumph: Jamison to Receive Kennedy Center Honor During Ailey
Company’s New York Season,” Dance Magazine, December 1999, 45. Thanks to Karen
Hildebrand of Dance Magazine for faxing me this article.
69 George “Buster” Cooper, telephone interview with the author, 5 August 2010.
246 carl woideck
Every foot was tapping the floor rhythmically and the servant and the doorman
were executing the same movements as the diplomat and the university graduate.
The fiery trumpets of Duke Ellington had just broken down the social barriers
once again. But that was only the beginning.
On Monday the Daniel Sorano National Theater was full to bursting. Men,
women, children, old people, all those for whom jazz is a friend, a confidant, a
consoler, Duke Ellington brought each one what he was expecting, that is to say,
what he himself had received . . .
Without ever losing sight of the African origins of jazz, Ellington inserts into
this art imaginative harmonies and European rhythms, merging the most disparate
elements into a new folkloric form.
Note here that despite Ellington having often characterized his music as
“African,” when this African reviewer specifically mentions Ellington’s
rhythms, he notably calls them European, not African.
In an audio interview conducted in Dakar, Ellington discussed distinc-
tions in rhythmic complexity between his music and that of some of the
African music he was encountering at the festival:
My idea of Africa is this big, fat dream that I have, you know. You look way out in
space and you imagine this, that, and the other, and you put it down on paper, and
it comes out with complicated rhythms, and when you look at your complicated
rhythms, and you compare it with some of the complicated rhythms of the original
Africans, and then you say, “My little complicated rhythm is nothing,” you know.
[Laughs.] It’s not nearly as complex, and it’s – but, you know, “keep trying.”70
North American filmmaker William Greaves was in Dakar to document

the festival for the United States Information Agency. His film, The First
World Festival of Negro Arts, is the best readily available video source
for us to imagine the breadth of cultural and intellectual experiences
available to Ellington.71 The documentary includes several scenes with
Ellington onscreen. One segment shows Ellington, poet Langston Hughes,
and actress Marpesa Dawn viewing and discussing art at an exhibition,
with a performance of Ellington’s “El Viti” dubbed in on the soundtrack.
This performance was quite possibly recorded by Greaves at the festival.
The music continues – unsynchronized, as in much of the film – under
a few clips of the Ellington band performing in front of a large audience
during the daytime at the stadium. Some of these clips are repeated to
70 Unknown interviewer, “Duke Ellington: Ses impressions sur le festival (extraits).” Recorded 1
April, 1966. Institut national de l’audiovisuel (France), item PHD86071237.
71 The First World Festival of Negro Arts, directed by William Greaves, William Greaves
Productions, 2004. See www.williamgreaves.com/catalog.htm (accessed 28 November 2014).
lengthen the sequence. While Cat Anderson is heard on the soundtrack,

he and drummer Sam Woodyard are seen briefly. Woodyard is playing
a fast ride pattern that does not match the soundtrack’s slow tempo; a
reaction shot shows a few audience members clapping their hands at a
pace that also does not match the soundtrack. In addition, Ellington and
bassist John Lamb are seen from behind in a short segment that is looped
to make it last longer.72
Greaves’s motion picture camera was not the only one present during
the Ellington performance at Dakar stadium. Film from the same concert
also appears in a 1974 special program by the Italian television show, Adesso
Musica, in an episode titled “Recordo di Duke Ellington.”73 Here, a passage
of “Sophisticated Lady” is heard first, although again the video images do
not match the music soundtrack. When the band plays “The Opener,”
however, at times the performance images and sound do match, and at
other times there appear to be near matches between filmed performances
and the music heard. It is apparent that this segment (“The Opener”) is
the same performance discussed above during which, in Greaves’s film,
Sam Woodyard is playing a fast ride pattern. At one point, one can see a
motion picture camera behind Woodyard that has the same point of view
as Greaves’s shot and that may well be Greaves’s (or his crew’s) camera.
The sometimes-distant, sometimes-close, synchronization between image
and sound gives the impression that someone went to great lengths to try
to reconcile the music with the passages being played on screen (some-
thing that Greaves did not do in his Ellington band sequence). Further,
unsynchronized, film from this outdoor concert is also possessed by the
Institut national de l’audiovisuel in France.74
One other video has surfaced of Ellington and his band performing at
the stadium, this time at night and dated 7 April 1966.75 As found on the
Internet, it consists of Ellington introducing his routine medley of hits,
followed by the medley’s fanfare, a solo piano passage, and then a partial
version of “Satin Doll” (the first part of that medley). Ellington’s suit jacket
72 Greaves may have had additional, unused, Ellington audio from the festival, but two attempts
to contact him were not answered. Greaves died on 25 August 2014. See Mel Watkins, “William
Greaves, a Documentarian and Pioneering Journalist, Dies at 87,” New York Times, 26 August
2014, at www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/arts/william-greaves-a-documentarian-and-
pioneering-journalist-dies-at-87.html?˙r=0 (accessed 21 September 2014).
73 Grazie to Francesco Martinelli for sending a digitized copy of this television program to me.
74 Merci to Pascal Rozat for supplying this information. The footage is from a television program
titled La Semaine, date of broadcast unknown. Personal communication, 17 October 2014.
75 “Duke Ellington au festival du Dakar,” www.ina.fr/video/CAF97016560/
duke-ellington-au-festival-de-dakar-video.html (accessed 23 September 2014)
248 carl woideck
is different from the other film footage, and the event is clearly shown to be
at night. Unique among the three film sources discussed here, the sound
an image are well-synchronized. Unfortunately, Ellington’s comments to
the audience do not include any references to being in Africa.
It is not clear how many times, and when, Ellington and his band
played at the festival. The official festival program (published before the
festival) lists one concert at the theater (4 April at 21:00) and two per-
formances at the stadium (5 April at both 16:00 and 21:00). (Note that
4 April does not match the date of the Europe 1 radio broadcast, and 5
April does not match the film of the evening stadium concert discussed
above.) Ellington reported (see below) that they played six times: twice at
Théâtre Daniel Sorano, twice at the stadium, and twice at the U.S. Embassy.
(The official program naturally did not list private performances at the
embassy.)
The French public radio service Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision
Française (ORTF) recorded a 9 April Ellington indoor concert (also not
listed in the festival program) at the Théâtre Daniel Sorano.76 This concert
could be the additional theater appearance that Ellington spoke of. The
ORTF recording that the author has heard begins with a medley consisting
of Black and Tan Fantasy, Creole Love Call, and The Mooche. All three
featured some degree of plunger-mute trumpet playing, and the last piece
of course had definitely been played at the Harlem Cotton Club, once
again linking Ellington’s “imaginary” jungle music with the real Africa.
(As usual, Ellington’s spoken introduction to this medley does not mention
any connection to the Cotton Club or what others called jungle music.)
“El Viti,” mentioned above, was also played.
Later in the concert, Ellington chose “La Plus Belle Africaine,” which in
subsequent performances he customarily announced had been written in
anticipation of the band’s trip to Africa. However, on the Dakar recording,
Ellington merely says “Our next number is ‘La Plus Belle Africaine.’” On
this concert recording, in fact, Ellington is not heard making any references
to the festival or to Africa. There is no adjustment of his usual presentation
practices for the new context of this Africa-based festival. The only audible
adaptations that Ellington makes to his francophone audience come when
he says “Merci beaucoup” after “Dancers in Love” and declares several
76 “Concert de Duke Ellington au Festival des arts africains.” Recorded 9 April 1966. Broadcast
date is unknown. Institut national de l’audiovisuel (France), item PHF06041584. A slightly
edited version of this concert (that begins with a partial version of Take the “A” Train and an
introduction by Ellington) was later broadcast over Europe 1 radio.
times (as he often did) “Je vous aime à la folie.” (Also, someone exclaims
“Oui!” after Johnny Hodges is mentioned by Ellington after “Dancers in
Love.”)
What repertoire the orchestra played at the other five Dakar appearances
is unknown. Usually when Ellington played more than one concert in a
particular city, he varied his program. Upon his arrival in Dakar, Ellington
was asked by an interviewer if he would play a “special program for the
festival” and said, “Well, no; what we play is – we will probably play
programs which will cover some of our early things as far back as 1927
and [192]8, and some of the things of the Thirties, some of the things
of the Forties, some of the Fifties, and some of the Sixty-six. And [will]
probably be mixed in with some of the longer works.” He also mentions
the likelihood that they will play a medley of his hit songs.77
Apart from “La Plus Belle Africaine,” Ellington and the band theoreti-
cally could have played any of his other 1960–6 pieces with at least a titular
African connection (such as “Cong-go,” “Springtime in Africa,” “Birdie
Jungle,” “Money Jungle,” “La Fleurette Africaine,” “Afro-Bossa,” “After
Bird Jungle,” “Jungle Triangle,” “Jungle Kitty,” and “Virgin Jungle”), but
of these only “Afro-Bossa” was regularly played in public, so that com-
position is really the only likely candidate from this group of additional
African-titled pieces that he might have played during his Senegal visit.
The 5 April stadium concert gave Ellington his second documented
opportunity to play with an African percussionist. Senegalese percussion-
ist Gana M’bow was photographed sitting in and playing what looks like
a conga drum while Ellington holds a microphone close (Figure 8.2).
(M’bow had already sat in with and been recorded with Art Blakey and
the Jazz Messengers in Paris in 1959.78 ) The others in the Dakar concert
photo are Sam Woodyard (on a standard drum kit) and bassist John Lamb.
This encounter has not been previously reported in Ellington literature.
Unfortunately, I have found no report of what music was played with
M’bow.
That Ellington was deeply moved by the cultural, artistic, and his-
torical aspects of the festival is clear in the three-page “Dakar Journal,
1966” entry in his memoir, Music Is My Mistress. After describing the
scope of the festival, Ellington wrote “And every night, on the balcony
77 Unknown interviewer, “Duke Ellington, Arrivée à Dakar,” PHD86071237.

78 Art Blakey, Art Blakey et les Jazz Messengers au Club St Germain 1958, BMG (France) ND
74897, 2006 compact disc. Recorded 21 December 1959. Percussionists M’bow and Kenny
Clarke sit in on several pieces.
250 carl woideck
Figure 8.2 The Ellington orchestra with Senegalese percussionist Gana M’bow in
Dakar, April 1966. Ruth Ellington Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of
American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
of the ninth floor of the Engar Hotel, I sit and listen to the sea singing
her songs of the historic past on the island from which the slaves were
shipped.” After more colorful scene-setting, he comments that “After
writing African music for thirty-five years, here I am at last in Africa!”79
Thirty-five years was probably just an approximate number, but he also
could have been recalling that something in his music or consciousness
changed around 1931. For example, 1931 was the year he ended his long
Cotton Club residency and thereby stopped writing for the club’s jungle
routines.
In his memoir comments, Ellington does not discuss the festival itself
at length, and half of his “Dakar Journal” is taken up with an Ellington
parable about jazz. A Senegalese artist, Papa Ibra Tall, had asked Ellington
to explain jazz. Of course, Ellington had avoided calling his music “jazz”
for many years, but he obliged Tall. In his highly imagistic description,
jazz is a tree “whose branches reach out in all directions.” Its blossoms and
fruit are highly varied, “but as we study it more deeply, we find that its very

blue-blooded roots are permanently married to, and firmly ensconced in,
the very rich black earth of beautiful Black Africa.”80
What Did Ellington Mean by “African Music”?
Upon his return to the United States, Ellington gave several interviews in
which he discussed his African trip. In one, Ellington made a statement
similar to the one that he later included in his memoir: “I’ve been playing
and writing African music for thirty-five years, and when I got to Africa,
I knew it and they knew it. Everyone loved it. I played ‘La Plus Belle
Africaine’ and they all broke loose – singing, clapping – not just the little
people, even the diplomats!”81 Note that Ellington no longer called it
pseudo-African music, as he had upon his arrival in Senegal.
What did Ellington mean by “African music”? As early as the 1920s,
he had proposed to Fletcher Henderson that they call their music “Negro
music” and not jazz.82 In the 1930s and 1940s, he spoke repeatedly of
playing “Negro music.”83 In a 1941 interview, Ellington was asked: “Then
you believe the Negro’s contribution to music can be traced back to
the culture of African people?” To this query, he replied: “Yes and no.
Occasionally a strain breaks through that sounds primitive. But Negro
music is American. It developed out of the life of the people here in this
country.”84 If Negro music is American, why did Ellington later assert
that he played African music, and that he had done this for so many
years? Senghor used the term négritude to express a commonality among
those of African descent. In this spirit, although he did not state it in
subsequent interviews or in his memoir, likely Ellington was so impressed
by the breadth of African diasporic artistic expression as seen and heard
at the festival that he concluded that his music was indeed within that
80 Ibid., 338–9.
81 Ellington as quoted in Sister Mary Felice (a.k.a. Beverly Lacayo), “An Interview with the Duke,”
Africa, Summer 1966, 24. The publication (a quarterly magazine by the White Sisters out of
Piscataway, NJ) lists Felice in a photo caption (Beverly Lacayo of Tallahassee, Fla.). Her
religious name within the White Sisters religious order was Sister Mary Felice.
82 See Nat Hentoff, “Final Chorus,” Jazz Times, May 1999, http://jazztimes.com/articles/
20717-duke-ellington-s-mission (accessed 22 August 2009). Hentoff notes that Ellington “also
told me of how, in the 1920s, he had said to Fletcher Henderson, ‘Why don’t we drop the word,
“jazz,” and call what we’re doing, “Negro music.” Then there won’t be any confusion.’”
83 See, for example, “Duke Ellington Defends His Music,” Sunday Post, July 1933, n.p., in Tucker,
Reader, 81.
84 John Pittman, “The Duke Will Stay on Top!,” no source, n. p., reprinted in Tucker, Reader,
150–1.
252 carl woideck
broad spectrum, and could be called African music. As we have already

seen, he said while in Dakar that “jazz [is] an African export” and “the
foundation of all the music that is being heard today at such a popular
level is . . . African, or Negro.”85
In another post-Africa article, Ellington told critic Leonard Feather,
It was a magnificent experience. Dinner with President and Mrs. Senghor. Senegal
Africans demonstrating exotic instruments. Poets and painters and folklorists from
South Africa and the Carribbean [sic]. We played six shows in five days: two at a
theater, two in a big sport stadium, and two at the U.S. Embassy, where we had the
pleasure of a reunion with Mr. and Mrs. Mercer Cook.86
Mercer Cook, a childhood friend of Ellington’s, was the son of composer

and Ellington mentor Will Marion Cook. Ellington notably named his
son after Mercer Cook, and Mercer Ellington, who was at the time play-
ing trumpet in his father’s band, was also quoted in this article: “Sam
Woodyard, our drummer, was a big hit. He’s spent a lot of time studying
African rhythms, so the natives got a big kick out of hearing their own
licks come back home.”87 What Woodyard had previously gleaned from
African musicians directly or from musical recordings is unknown to this
author.
What demonstrable musical effect – if any – did Ellington’s participation
in the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres have on him? As seen
above, he began to present himself as a composer of African, not Negro,
music. But beyond this observation, there is a lack of demonstrable or
audible effect upon him and/or his music.
As is well known, Ellington had for years written music that was inspired
by people and places. It is also well known that he sometimes claimed
various inspirations for pieces that were in fact composed before his
actual exposure to, or just independently of, his stated inspirations. But it
is striking that after his visit to Senegal (and for the next eight years of his
life), Ellington never claimed that any of his post-Senegal compositions
were inspired by his trip to that country.
For comparison, let us take Ellington’s 1963 State Department trip that
included travels to numerous Middle East countries as well as India and
Pakistan. Ellington predicted soon after this tour: “I hope much of all this
85 Unknown interviewer, “Duke Ellington, Arrivée à Dakar.” Recorded 1 April 1966. Institut
national de l’audiovisuel (France), item PHD86071223.
86 Leonard Feather, “Jazzing It Up: Duke Ellington Keeps on Bettering His Music,” The
Washington Post, 29 May 1966, G8.
87 Ibid.
will go into music . . . I think I have to be careful not to be influenced too

strongly by the music we heard . . . I would rather give a reflection of the
trip itself . . . You let it roll around, undergo a chemical change, and then
seep out on paper.”88 The eventual product of these musings, of course,
was his Far East Suite, which by the time of its final album form in 1967
also included a piece (“Ad Lib On Nippon”) inspired by his subsequent
1964 tour of Japan. Typical of Ellington, not all of the pieces in this suite
were actually influenced by the experiences of these trips; for example,
“Depk” was composed prior to the 1963 tour.89 (Another example of this
sort can be seen in Billy Strayhorn’s previously composed “Elf,” which
Ellington appropriated for the suite and retitled “Isfahan.”90 ) The titles
of the suite’s movements for the most part refer to the State Department
and Japan tours, and in the album’s original liner notes, Ellington has an
evocative programmatic story or description for each, whether or not the
given movement was written before or after these tours.
This is not to say that Ellington’s only options were to compose music
reflecting his musical or cultural experiences while in Dakar. As he told
an interviewer at the festival: “I sit enchanted up there on the ninth floor
[of his hotel] and look at the sea, sometimes all night, waiting for these
different blues to change. You know it has a million blues out here. You
gotta get up there and just watch ’em, you know, hour after [hour] . . . As
the moon moves in and out from behind those clouds, you get different
blues, you know, and these various blued things are wonderful.”91 The
composer of “Transblucency,” “Azure,” and other blue-hued pieces also
had more abstract, imagistic experiences to artistically inspire him in
Dakar.
Why did Ellington not write any explicitly Senegal-inspired pieces, or at
least claim that one or more of his subsequent compositions were inspired
by his clearly meaningful experiences at the Dakar festival? Certainly, he
had some high-priority projects to take care of upon his return from Africa.
This work included finally recording his and Strayhorn’s Far East Suite,
and creating his Second Sacred Concert. Nevertheless, having finished those
projects, he went on to complete a number of suites that were inspired to
one degree or another by places he had visited (such as the New Orleans
Suite, the Goutelas Suite, and the UWIS Suite).
88 Duke Ellington, “Orientations: Adventures in the Mid-East,” Music Journal, March 1964, 35.
89 Ibid., 36. Ellington speaks of the piece using its tentative title, “The Dancing Girls.”
90 Hajdu, Lush, 234.
91 Unknown interviewer, “Duke Ellington, Arrivée à Dakar,” PHD86071223.
254 carl woideck
Although his not explicitly using (or claiming to use) his experiences in
Senegal as musical inspiration was uncharacteristic behavior for Ellington,
that does not mean that he was not artistically affected by this visit. Perhaps
Ellington wanted to compose material toward a Dakar-inspired suite but
never emerged with enough material, and – because the experience was
so meaningful to him – chose not to adapt some previously composed or
otherwise unrelated pieces to flesh out a Senegal suite. Of course, in the
end, Ellington the artist had to choose which concepts and projects were
most appealing to him.
Later Evocations of the “Jungle Garden”
Returning to the survey of Ellington compositional titles for even passing

connections to Africa, we see that, post-Senegal, Ellington wrote only a
few pieces whose titles refer to Africa. These include the individual pieces
“Tippy-Toeing through the Jungle Garden” and “Afrique,” plus the suites
The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse and the Togo Brava Suite (a.k.a. the Togo Brava-
Brava Togo Suite).
As recorded in 1970, “Tippy-Toeing through the Jungle Garden” is a 12-
measure blues played in unison by wind instruments over a swing beat.92
Ellington does not play on the recording, although he at times conducted
the group. Musically, it includes no references to Ellington’s jungle music
style or to Western African music during the slave trade.
“Afrique” has an unusual history in that it was inserted into two Elling-
ton suites, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, and the Togo Brava Suite (both 1971
studio recordings). A complete telling of this number’s complicated rela-
tionship to these two suites is beyond the scope of this chapter, but some
details are relevant here.93 In at least one unissued live recording of the
piece (from 18 September 1970), the composition is announced as “Deep
Forest.”94 There are three issued studio recordings, however, and these
will be discussed here.
92 Duke Ellington, The Intimacy of the Blues, Original Jazz Classics OJCCD-624–2, 1986, compact
disc.
93 For more details, see Stefano Zenni, “The Aesthetics of Duke Ellington’s Suites: The Case of
‘Togo Brava,’” Black Music Research Journal 21 (Spring 2001): 12–19.
94 Another title for the piece, “Teak Forest,” is thought to be a mis-hearing of Ellington’s
announcement calling the piece “Deep Forest” on a concert tape from this date. See “Part 4,
Timner-Hoefsmit Q&A, New Desor Corrections, DEMS 20–22,” The International DEMS
Bulletin 1 (December 2001–March 2002), 20, http://depanorama.net/dems/01dems3d.htm
(accessed 5 October 2009).
The first two versions of “Afrique” to be recorded95 feature trap drum-

mer Rufus Jones using mallets on his tom-toms, a detail that on its surface
suggests a link to Ellington’s Cotton Club-era jungle music. But Jones’s
repeated rhythm pattern (dotted quarter – dotted quarter –quarter) does
not really relate to either Ellington’s jungle music or Western African
drumming (meaning, in specific, the drum music Ellington was likely
exposed to in Dakar, some of which can be heard on the soundtrack of
William Greaves’s film of the Dakar festival). Ellington nevertheless said
that Jones excelled in “African, jungle, and oriental pieces”96 and perhaps
in Ellington’s mind, mallets on tom-toms conveyed a generic exotic qual-
ity. At any rate, authenticity was not Ellington’s real concern in “Afrique.”
That these two versions lack any musical resemblance to Western African
music is not surprising because Jones was not in Senegal with the band,
and because Ellington did not write out parts for his drummers. A stronger
resemblance to Ellington’s jungle music comes in the use in “Afrique” of
wah-wah trombones and minor tonality.
The second of these versions was released to the public after Ellington’s
death as part of The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, and was the only movement
of the suite whose title clearly referred to Africa. Although the suite’s
name covers a lot of geography, Ellington’s habitual in-concert verbal
introduction only referred to the “Orient” and Australia, not Africa.
The third version of “Afrique” to be recorded was included as one of
seven movements assembled on a reel of tape that was prepared around
1971 for release and labeled “Togo Brava Master.”97 (The recordings were
not in fact issued until 2001.) As Ellington wrote in his memoir, “In 1967
the Republic of Togoland released a set of four postage stamps dedicated
to the twentieth anniversary of UNESCO. Each stamp bore the likeness of
a musician, the four chosen being Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, and myself –
a rare honor, indeed, to be in such company! Our humble suite was just a
token of gratitude and appreciation.”98 Although Ellington never visited
Togo, his suite was dedicated to that country.
Ellington performed portions of the Togo Brava Suite in concert, and
one live recording that includes four movements has been commercially
95 The first version, from 9 July 1970, can be heard on Duke Ellington, New York, New York,
Storyville 1018402, 2008, compact disc; and the second version, from 17 February 1971, can be
heard on Duke Ellington, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, Fantasy OJCCD 645-2, 1991, compact disc.
96 Quoted by Stanley Dance, in the liner note to Ellington, Afro-Eurasian Eclipse.
97 Recorded on 28 June 1971, this performance can be heard on Duke Ellington, Togo Brava Suite,
Storyville STCD 8323, 2001, compact disc.
256 carl woideck
issued.99 On this release, after performing “Soul Soothing Beach,” he

announces:
That, ladies and gentlemen, was the first movement of four movements of a suite,
and that particular movement represented a hundred miles of beautiful, silver sand
beach with a southern exposure facing the Equator on the western bulge of Africa.
A beautiful little country titled Togoland. Togo Brava-Brava Togo is the title of the
suite.
Ellington is correct in how he situates the Republic of Togo, although the

nation does not literally have 100 miles of coastline. Senegal does, though,
and there is a chance that Ellington was fondly remembering the beach at
Dakar. (In William Greaves’s documentary of the festival in Dakar, author
Langston Hughes is actually seen walking on that beach.)
If the lilting beat and gently stated melody of “Soul Soothing Beach”
resemble anything heard at the festival, it might be music like the reflective
kora and balafon duet “Improvisation pour une fête” heard on the vinyl
record Premier festival mondial des arts nègres issued after the festival.100
It is, of course, not known whether Ellington heard similar music in
Dakar. The closest to “Soul Soothing Beach” heard on the soundtrack
of Greaves’s film is the steel drum (or steel pan) band L’Orchestre de
Trinidad et Tobago. (Instead of music from their countries, they are heard
playing a lilting arrangement of the Brazilian composer Antônio Carlos
Jobim’s “Garota de Ipanema”/“The Girl from Ipanema”!) In the title
“Soul Soothing Beach,” and in Ellington’s verbal description of 100 miles
of coastline, this piece’s potential connection with Ellington’s experiences
in Dakar is only slight.
Lastly, in the above-discussed live recording of Togo Brava Suite selec-
tions, Ellington follows his description of “Soul Soothing Beach” with
the statement: “And now, into the jungle.” The first section that follows,
“Amour, Amour,” does not resemble Ellington’s jungle music melodically,
harmonically (12-bar blues in B-flat and D), or rhythmically (a swing beat
with the bass in “two” and then “four”). But the final section, “Right On
Togo,” brings a bluesy melody in B minor over a prominent drum part
featuring what sounds like the thick end of the drumsticks on tom-toms.
The basic 4/4 is suspended briefly by a section with a 3/4 feel. If we have
gone “into the jungle,” it is the “imaginary” jungle of Ellington’s mind.
99 Togo Brava Suite, Blue Note 30082, 1994, compact disc.

100 Premier festival mondial des arts nègres, Philips (France) R77.486L, n.d., LP. “Improvisation
Pour Une Fête” is credited to S. Sissoko (kora) and M. Foca (balafon balante).
The Second African Trip
In Autumn 1973, about six months before Ellington’s death, he and his
band embarked on their last international tour, focused on England and
Europe with a brief side trip to Africa. The major event on the tour
calendar was the premiere of his Third Sacred Concert on 24 October in
Westminster Abbey in London.
From 20 to 23 November, Ellington and the band played five engage-
ments in Ethiopia. Surviving programs at the Smithsonian’s Duke Elling-
ton Collection document four events, all in Addis Ababa: a “command
performance” with Emperor Haile Selassie in his personal box seat on
20 November (20:30); two conventional concerts on 21 (21:00) and 22
November (16:30); and a “gala dinner dance” at the Hilton Hotel later on
the evening of 22 November. Several sources list an additional 20 Novem-
ber concert in the city of Asmara (then in a contested part of Ethiopia,
which is now part of Eritrea). 101 If these references are accurate, this event
most likely would have taken place earlier in the day than the command
performance.
As Ellington trombonist Vince Prudente recalled:
He [Selassie] had the band over to his castle. It was really great, man. We all met
informally, and he gave us all a gold coin . . . a little bit bigger than a quarter,
commemorating his inauguration when he first became emperor. And Duke got
a great big one [the Star of Ethiopia medal; also known as the Medal of Honor]
that . . . they put around his neck.102
A photo of the event shows Selassie and Ellington toasting with drinks in
their hands; Ellington has the star-shaped medal around his neck.103
In early 1974, Ellington recalled the band’s time in Addis Ababa:
Then we went on and we were presented to His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie,
the emperor of Ethiopia. And, uh, I got this gorgeous gold medal, you know? And
all the cats in the band they got a medium-size gold medal . . . And I think the
most unique thing of the whole show was that His Majesty had us welcomed
at the airport at Addis Ababa by a lion. A real, living, ever-lovin’, living lion
101 Stratemann, Day, 663, and Vail, Diary, Part 2, 444.

102 Vincent Prudente, telephone interview with the author, 19 July 2010.
103 The Crown Council of Ethiopia, “Ethiopian Emperor’s Grandson Honors African
Americans,” 12 September 2007, www.ethiopiancrown.org/press.htm (accessed 26 June
2010). Photo is uncredited.
258 carl woideck
Figure 8.3 Duke Ellington welcomed at the airport in Addis Ababa by Emperor Haile
Selassie’s pet lion, Mecuria, in 1974. Courtesy of Art Baron. Photographer
unknown.
[Figure 8.3.] . . . The lion’s name is Mecuria. [begins spelling] M, E, [pause; speaks
the title again] Mecuria.104
On the autumn 1973 tour, Ellington had been featuring in concert a

new piece that has been variously referred to as “Mecuria, the Lion” (as it
was released on CD), “Metcuria the Lion,” and simply “Metcuria.”105 It
is not clear that the piece initially had any title, but author and Ellington
friend Patricia Willard asked several musicians who were on the tour
(trumpeter Barrie Lee Hall, Jr., trombonist Art Baron, and drummer
Quentin “Rocky” White) how the title was pronounced, and the responses
varied.106
104 Interview recorded Washington, D.C., 10 February 1974. Duke Ellington Music Society, audio
cassette CA-2.
105 Ellington, Centennial Edition, disc 24.
106 Patricia Willard, liner note in booklet to Ellington, Centennial Edition, 116. The musicians’
phonetic answers varied from “Mekuria” to “Mekuyah” to “Muhcuria.” Willard writes that
Ellington called for the piece by saying “Me KOO.”
Barrie Lee Hall, Jr., remembered the piece:

There was this number we had been playing awhile before we got to Africa. Duke
was making the thing up as he went along. When we played it, he gave us a chord but
it seemed like the older guys already knew the tune. I remember hearing the guys
playing it and just put my own parts in. There wasn’t any written music. He would
start off playing this really pretty thing like he would with “Single Petal of a Rose” –
something melancholy like that and then he’s [sic] have Rocky play something and
we’re playing weird chords. That was the piece. After the royal treatment we received
from Haile Selassie, this piece that had been developing acquired a name and its
own little story. Show biz.107
Indeed, Ellington loved “show biz” and illusion. As encountered with
other aforementioned program pieces, “Mecuria, the Lion” was begun
before the Ethiopian trip but was eventually named for Selassie’s lion that
greeted Ellington and the band when they arrived in Ethiopia. This is
probably Ellington’s last composition with an African connection in its
title and backstory, but its compositional connection to Africa, Ethiopia,
and even that lion is not strong.
On this trip, some of the band members attended a performance by
the Orchestra Ethiopia, an ensemble that featured folk instruments and
performers from various regions of Ethiopia. Ellington trombonist Art
Baron believes (but is not positive) that Ellington came to the latter part
of this performance.108 But Ellington certainly did encounter the Berklee
School of Music-educated Ethiopian vibraphonist/keyboardist, Mulatu
Astatke (sometimes spelled as Astatké or Astatqé). When the Ellington
band played at the Addis Ababa Hilton on 22 November 1973, Astatke
brought a piece that he had arranged for jazz big band, and Ellington’s
orchestra read through the number that night. Astatke later recalled this
encounter: “We were due to play an evening concert so I discussed with him
if he would consider playing one of my arrangements. I wrote an arrange-
ment of ‘Dewel’ [more properly Dèwèl, meaning “Bell”] for his band, a
different version which included some beautiful voicings on the horns.”109
One African musical concept that Ellington and his band encountered in
“Dèwèl” is that the piece is based on a five-note scale that could be spelled
C–E–F–G–B (C) or F–G–B–C–E (F). Baron recalls how difficult
it was for him and some of the other Ellington musicians to correctly
107 Ibid. 108 Art Baron, telephone interview with the author, 23 July 2010.
109 Jeff Weiss, “A Conversation with Mulatu Astatke: On Heliocentrics, Ethio-Jazz and Ellington,”
www.laweekly.com/music/a-conversation-with-mulatu-astatke-on-heliocentrics-ethio-jazz-
and-ellington-2402578 (accessed 14 January 2017).
260 carl woideck
sight-read a piece with such an unfamiliar key signature that includes

both F and E (this combination does not occur in common-practice
Western music).110 At some point, probably at a different engagement,
Ellington musicians Art Baron, Barrie Lee Hall, Jr., Johnny Coles, and
Harold Minerve sat in with Astatke’s own band; Baron said that Ellington
might have been present for this event.111
Figure 8.4 is a photo of the Hilton Hotel event which shows Astatke
standing behind the piano while drummer Rocky White studies a drum
part (bassist Joe Benjamin is also holding sheet music). Ellington is bearing
an Ethiopian krar (a lyre). In 2006, Astatke recalled the encounter: “I’ll
never forget Duke’s reaction. He listened attentively and said: ‘Mulatu,
your music has such a nice sound. I didn’t expect something like that
from an African. Excellent work.’”112 I believe that Ellington meant that
he was surprised that Astatke was so conversant with the instruments and
idiom of jazz (as opposed to being surprised that an African could literally
write music with a “nice sound”).113
Astatke and Ellington had quite a bit of contact during this brief visit.
According to Astatke,
I was assigned by the Embassy to be Ellington’s escort while he was in Addis. We

both stayed at the Hilton in Addis and, whatever he needs or wants to know about
Ethiopia, I was his guide. I had always admired him as an arranger, composer and
bandleader. During my music studies, I had analyzed his work in detail. During his
visit, I showed him some of the cultural musical instruments, which he found really
interesting. Some of our cultural musical players jammed with Ellington’s guys – we
went to the U.S. Information Centre in Addis and played together. I then took him
to the King’s palace and he was given a medal by Emperor Heile [Haile] Selassie. It
was a big ceremony.114
As a “student of Negro history,” Ellington of course knew some of the

history of Ethiopia and Selassie. (Moreover, in 1941, Ellington had notably
110 Baron telephone interview. Baron describes this sight-reading problem as taking place at a
different event with Astatke; nevertheless, the piece “Dèwèl” does employ this key signature
(in concert key).
111 Art Baron, telephone interview with the author, 9 December 2014.
112 Ben Shalev, “A Second Round of Glory,” Haaretz.com, 20 June 2006, www.haaretz.com/
israel-news/culture/leisure/a-second-round-of-glory-1.190886 (accessed 14 January 2017).
In 2009, Astatke donated an arrangement of “Dèwèl” for four horns and rhythm section to the
Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
113 John Hasse, “Lecturing in Ethiopia and Kenya,” http://johnedwardhasse.blogspot.com/
(accessed 20 September 2010). Hasse is Curator, Division of Culture and the Arts, National
Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
114 Weiss, “A Conversation.”
Figure 8.4 The Ellington Orchestra at the Addis Ababa Hilton Hotel on 22 November
1973, with Ethiopian vibraphonist/keyboardist, Mulatu Astatke, standing behind the
piano while drummer Rocky White studies a drum part (bassist Joe Benjamin is also
holding sheet music). Duke Ellington is holding an Ethiopian krar (a lyre). This
photograph can be found at various places on the Internet, all uncredited. The author
found this image at www.columbia.edu/∼jnt21/Ethiomusic.html in 2010, and the
weblink no longer functions
been part of a Rex Stewart-led recording session whose selections included

Stewart’s “Menelik – the Lion of Judah,” a reference either to Ethiopia’s
1889–1913 emperor Menelik II or Haile Selassie, who was also sometimes
called the Lion of Judah.) With this likely historical awareness, Ellington’s
meeting the emperor was probably very significant to him. And if Ellington
in his youth had attended the aforementioned pageant The Star of Ethiopia,
being in Ethiopia and receiving the Star of Ethiopia medal would have been
experiences that had been a long time coming.
Immediately after their time in Ethiopia, Ellington and his orchestra
traveled to Lusaka, Zambia. This trip probably occurred on 23 November
262 carl woideck
1973. One source reports that there were concerts in Lusaka on 23–4
November.115 Art Baron recalls playing one concert in Lusaka’s Mulun-
gushi Hall, but he also remembers playing in the city of Nbara, Zambia,
so it is possible that the band only played once in Lusaka.
At some point in Zambia, drummer Rocky White played with some of
the country’s percussionists. Baron recalled that it understandably took a
moment for the musicians to adjust to one another’s musical concepts. He
continued, “it was a new experience for Rocky, playing with the indigenous
instruments. It was a beautiful exchange for all, and I felt that the music
had come full circle.”116
Occurring so late in his life (and after he had completed his memoir),
it appears that Ellington was not quoted in print expressing his reaction
to traveling to Ethiopia and to meeting Selassie. In telephone interviews
with this author, several Ellington musicians who were in the band at the
time – Baron, Hall, and Prudente – could not recall Ellington expressing
anything specific to them about what the trips to Ethiopia and Zambia
meant to him. At the time, Ellington was ill with cancer and of course he
had less energy to interact with his band.
When asked if Ellington emphasized any part of his repertoire or made
any adjustments to his presentations because he was playing for an African
audience, Baron remembered playing at least one section of the Toga Brava
Suite and possibly “La Plus Belle Africaine” in Ethiopia and/or Zambia.
He also recalled one aspect of the band’s show that was not changed for an
African audience. Ellington sometimes featured Harold Minerve soloing
on alto saxophone, flute, and piccolo on a piece variously called “In Trip-
licate,” “In Duplicate,” or “Quadruped.” After they had played the piece,
Ellington would lengthen his spoken credits by thanking Minerve for each
of his instruments, one at a time. After the third announcement (“And
the piccolo solo was by Harold Minerve”), Baron remembered that Min-
erve would come out from behind his music stand and thank Ellington
by bowing with outstretched arms and loudly proclaiming in a pseudo-
African language “‘Hooglama, Hooglamangabia’ as well as the well-known
‘ungawa.’”117 Judging from a video performance of the number,118 Elling-
ton played along minimally, gesturing a bit and making a few sounds.
According to Baron, “We were, like, wondering when we went to Africa if
115 Vail, Diary, Part 2, 445.

116 Art Baron, telephone interviews with the author, 23 July 2010 and 9 December 2014.
117 Email from Art Baron to the author, 23 July 2010. Spelling and capitalization as in the original.
118 Video provided via email from Barrie Lee Hall, Jr., 7 August 2010.
he [Minerve] would do that. And he did it, straight ahead, like we were
anywhere else.”119
Conclusion
As seen earlier, in 1966 Ellington called his idea of Africa “this big, fat
dream that I have, you know. You look way out in space and you imagine
this, that, and the other.” At the end of his life, Ellington’s musical concept
of Africa was just that: his unique musical concept of Africa. Although
in 1974 it was a more informed concept than it had been in the 1920s,
in other ways it was not so different from what it was in 1928 when he
composed The Mooche for the Cotton Club. It was a conception of Africa
derived largely from Ellington’s imagination.
Although he praised Max Roach’s playing on “Fleurette Africaine” as
“authentic,” authenticity was not really important to Ellington, whether
he was writing for the Cotton Club or for the Republic of Togo, as has
been established several times across this chapter. At a 20 November
1958 Parisian concert at the Salle Pleyel, Ellington introduced the Juan
Tizol/Duke Ellington composition Caravan in this manner: “And now,
[pause] a little authentic maraca, cha-cha-cha, rumba; [an] authentic
synthetic hybrid. [On the video, Ellington points to his drummer.] Sam
Woodyard. The jungle. The jungle.”120 The phrase “authentic synthetic
hybrid” neatly describes Ellington’s concepts of authenticity and his own
“African music.” In a similarly ironic vein, Ellington once wrote “To be a
great bull-shitter is great, but to be a great bull-shitter and wear a diffusing
veneer over the bull shit is the ultimate.”121 Ellington loved to signify. He
was no folkloric trickster figure; he was an actual trickster (among many
other things), and he reveled in that role.
We should not take too literally his 1966 claim to have been “writing
African music for thirty-five years,”122 noting that he had earlier said
119 Baron telephone interview. An audio version of this routine can be heard after the
performance of “In Duplicate” on Duke Ellington in Sweden, Caprice CAP 21599, 2003,
compact disc. Barrie Lee Hall remembered that Minerve sometimes instead proclaimed “Ala!
[like Allah] Ala! Alabama!” Barrie Lee Hall, telephone interview with the author, 7 August
2010.
120 Duke Ellington et son Orchestre, dir. Claude Loursais (1958), viewable online at http://
boutique.ina.fr/video/CPF86644455/duke-ellington-et-son-orchestre.fr.html?
exampleSessionId=1259034226868&exampleUserLabel=Your%20Name (accessed 23
November 2009).
121 Ruth Ellington Collection, Series 6, box 7, folder 2. 122 Ellington, Mistress, 337.
264 carl woideck
“Negro music is American. It developed out of the life of the people

here in this country.”123 But having encountered the wide scope of music
and arts from around the globe at the 1966 Premier festival mondial des
arts nègres, Ellington likely saw his own music as part of a larger African
diasporic whole.
Given Ellington’s own statement that “Painting a picture, or having a
story to go with what you were going to play was of vital importance in
those days,”124 it is not surprising that he sometimes concocted “a story
to go with what you were going to play” when it came to the mythic Africa
and its jungle. In 1941, he acknowledged that if he attempted to write
music evocative of West Africa, it would be “mostly imaginary, because
no one today knows what African Negro music was like in the days of the
early slave traders.”125
During all periods of his career, before and after his first-hand expe-
riences with African music and culture, Ellington indeed wrote (using
his words) “imaginary” “authentic synthetic hybrid” “pseudo-African
music.” Which is certainly authentic Ellington music.
123 John Pittman, “The Duke Will Stay on Top!,” no source, n.p., reprinted in Tucker, Reader,
150–1.
124 Ellington, Mistress, 47. 125 Frankenstein, “‘Hot Is Something,” in Tucker, “Genesis,” 75.
9 “The Mother of All Albums”: Revisiting
Ellington’s A Drum Is a Woman
john wriggle
According to an anecdote related by Columbia Records producer Irving

Townsend, Duke Ellington pitched the idea for his “musical allegory,” A
Drum Is a Woman, immediately before appearing on stage at the July 1956
Newport Jazz Festival:1
“Did you know,” [Duke] asked me, “that a drum is a woman?” . . .

“Is that the first album?” I asked . . .
“Man, that’s not only the first album, that’s the mother of all albums. That’s the
story of Madam Zajj.” . . . “Madam Zajj,” he stretched the words. “She was always a
lady, you know, but she was also a drum.”
“Do we have a deal?” I asked as he turned toward the stage.
“Record companies don’t like me,” Duke warned. “Are you sure you won’t get
fired?”
I assured him I wouldn’t.
“See you in New York next week,” he called, disappearing through the tent flap.2
In hindsight, the drama of the proposition matches that of the moment,

as 1956 was shaping up to be one of the most consequential periods in
Ellington’s life. Across this year, the composer-arranger Billy Strayhorn
returned to the Ellington organization in a newly expanded role3 ; media
giant Columbia Records negotiated a new contract with Ellington, return-
ing the bandleader to a platform of extensive product distribution and
mainstream marketing4 ; the success of the orchestra’s Newport appear-
ance (and the ensuing At Newport album) catapulted the bandleader back
into critical favor5 ; and a Time magazine cover story published in August
1 Portions of this chapter were presented at the annual conference of the American Musicological
Society, November 2010, Indianapolis.
2 Irving Townsend, “Ellington in Private,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1975, 79.
3 An account of Strayhorn’s return is offered in Hajdu, Lush, 145–6.
4 See “Ellington Rejoins Columbia,” Oakland Tribune, 2 September 1956, on file at the Institute
of Jazz Studies (“IJS”), Rutgers University, Newark.
5 A review of Ellington’s Newport performance is provided by Leonard Feather in “Newport
Festival: Saturday,” Down Beat, 8 August 1956, 18. An account of the Newport concert
recording is offered in John Morton, Backstory in Blue: Ellington at Newport ’56 (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 201–10. 265
266 john wriggle
sealed Ellington’s sudden return to top-tier commercial status.6 But there

was another pivotal development, with implications just as far-reaching
as the factors cited above. Arguably fulfilling the cliché of landmark career
achievements, Ellington’s tackling of A Drum Is a Woman would represent
nothing less than a summation of prior accomplishments and a herald of
those to come.
In its dual roles as a testimony to Ellington’s early career and his postwar
stature in American music, the February 1957 album release of A Drum Is a
Woman can be seen as something of a personal reaffirmation.7 Despite the
critical acclaim and commercial success of At Newport (released September
1956) and the subsequent return to instrumental suite-form design in
Such Sweet Thunder (released around September 1957), it is A Drum Is
a Woman that may stand as the primary catalyst in the resurrection of
Ellington’s creative energies following his nostalgic retreats of the earlier
1950s.8 Both the Drum album, recorded over September to December
1956, and the ensuing CBS U.S. Steel Hour 8 May 1957 telecast, allowed
Ellington to explore, establish, and celebrate his own place in jazz history
on (more or less) his own terms, thereby freeing the Ducal ego to devote
itself to another two decades of expansive creativity. At the same time,
Drum represents a bold step forward, as Ellington devotes the entire 12-
inch album to music newly composed by Strayhorn and himself. Through
a return to the stage revue format – an entertainment tradition that had
played a major role in both writers’ musical development, as well as the
early celebrity of Ellington – the team posits a strategy of building a
“concept album” work around the 12-inch LP format. This new media-
specific conceptual framework subsequently marks most all the keystone
accomplishments of Ellington’s later recording career.9
Townsend was not alone in his assessment of Drum as one of Ellington’s
“most self-revealing works,” particularly because Drum openly invites
6 “Mood Indigo and Beyond,” Time, 20 August 1956, 54–6, 58, 60, 63.
7 The album release month is cited in “Col, U.S. Steel and BBDO Beating Drums for Duke’s
‘Drum Is a Woman’ TV’er,” Variety, 24 April 1957, 43.
8 While Ellington was very active during the early 1950s, all of his Columbia, Capitol, and
Bethlehem LP recordings released during 1950–5 include at least one (if not multiple)
compositions dating prior to World War II. Biographers have typically presented this period of
Ellington’s career under chapter headings like “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” “Playing
for Time,” “Decline and Fall,” or “Nadir.” Nicholson, Reminiscing, 256; Hasse, Beyond, 303;
James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 255; and
Cohen, America, 271.
9 Regarding Drum and the emergence of Ellington’s “concept album” aesthetic, see Hasse,
Beyond, 333.
“The Mother of All Albums” 267
examination of Ellington’s personality and biography to a degree that

few of his other creations suggest or demand.10 Due to its length, dual
media releases, diversity of music, and rich programmatic concerns, this
combination album/telecast/composition has likewise contributed to sev-
eral important and longstanding themes of Ellington criticism, includ-
ing that of an Ellingtonian tragic flaw of artistic “ambition.”11 As com-
monly applied to Ellington’s compositional skills, this scourge of ambition
emerges in complaints of Drum’s “lack of continuity” or “incongruous
and disjointed” long-form design.12 The multimedia expanse of the Drum
project, comprising an extended “tone parallel” of the African American
experience and the history of jazz, and culminating in the maestro’s first
network television feature, promised a challenge under any circumstances.
Additional elements of beatnik-jive poetry, modern dance choreography,
misogynous humor, experimental color television technology, and the
pioneering prime-time television broadcast of an all-black cast to a still
largely segregated audience only raised the potential for controversy.
The high media profile of Drum also offered music critics a prime
opportunity to tout allegiances to post-Swing era conceptions of jazz
authenticity: efforts to define the art form through idealizations of instru-
mental improvisation and starving-artist economic purity. Even the posi-
tive review of Drum by jazz critic (and former Ellington publicist) Leonard
Feather made sure to chastise “the non-jazz direction of some of the
music.”13 Peter Gammond faulted Drum’s very inclusion of spoken or sung
words, “as testified by the almost universal banality of opera libretti.”14
Edward Towler not only condemned the “travesty” of Drum’s “commer-
cial considerations” as opposed to those of “genuine experiment,” but also
invoked another prevalent Ellingtonian theme – that of the bandleader’s
perpetual fall from grace – in citing a lack of the musical qualities “that one
10 Townsend, “Ellington in Private,” 80. Jack Tracy provided a similar assessment of Drum soon
after its release, calling it “a revealing self-portrait of Duke Ellington.” Jack Tracy, “Jazz
Records: Duke Ellington, ‘A Drum Is a Woman,’” Down Beat, 2 May 1957, 25–6.
11 A Time magazine review, for example, pegged the Drum telecast as both Ellington’s “most
ambitious project in years” and “pretentious.” “Television and Radio: Review,” Time, 20 May
1957, 95.
12 Leonard Feather, “Two Thumps on ‘A Drum’: Thumps Up,” Down Beat, 27 June 1957, 18;
Edward Towler, “Reflections on Hearing ‘A Drum Is a Woman,’” Jazz Monthly, September
1957, 30.
13 Feather, “Two Thumps,” 18. Drum never even had a chance in Down Beat’s companion review
by Barry Ulanov, who admitted: “I don’t know what precisely we expected, but it wasn’t this.”
Barry Ulanov, “Two Thumps on ‘A Drum’: Thumps Down,” Down Beat, 27 June 1957, 18.
14 Peter Gammond, Duke Ellington: His Life and Music (London: Phoenix House, 1958), 134.
268 john wriggle
associates with Ellington’s earlier works.”15 Following decades of charges

of this project being “dated,” “pedestrian,” “naı̈ve,” or a “catastrophe,”
video of the Drum telecast has yet to be commercially released, while
the album remains rarely reissued and lies in the shadow of Ellington’s
more canonical suite albums and extended compositions.16 This oversight
likely stems from the very characteristics that make Drum so represen-
tative of Ellington’s legacy; an examination of Drum’s social and musical
context offers insight into what Townsend identified as “probably [the]
least understood of all Ellington’s major recordings.”17
In addition to the Columbia LP and CBS telecast, the legacy of the Drum
project includes an assortment of manuscript music, preparatory notes,
and draft scripts. These artifacts include: handwritten notes by Ellington,
appearing to date from the summer and fall of 1956 (hereafter “hand-
written notes”); typewritten notes with additional handwritten edits by
Ellington, appearing to date from the same period (hereafter “typewritten
notes”); a typewritten script including extensive passages of narration and
a sort of futuristic-beatnik “mechanical birdie” character not included
in the final telecast or any other scripts or notes, presumably a CBS
draft dating to early 1957 (hereafter “rejected script”); and a typewritten
revised script that essentially reflects the final telecast production, labeled
“adapted for television by Will Lorin,” and dated 12 April 1957 (hereafter
“telecast script”). There is also a typed draft script for Drum labeled “Ber-
telsmann Fernseh-Produktion,” which refers to a West German television
production company formed around 1960. Despite this latter script’s title
page credit “by Duke Ellington,” Ellington’s precise relationship to this
document (hereafter “West German script”) is unclear.18
15 Towler, “Reflections,” 30.

16 The cited criticisms of Drum include Van de Leur, Something, 134; Collier, Duke, 285;
Stratemann, Day, 376; and John S. Wilson, “Jazz: Ellington,” New York Times, 13 October 1957,
132.
17 Irving Townsend, “When Duke Records,” in Tucker, Reader, 320.
18 “A Drum Is a Woman,” Duke Ellington Collection, Series 1 (music), boxes 105 and 106, and
Series 4 (scripts and notes), box 1. Drum manuscripts are also held in the Billy Strayhorn
Collection (in the possession of the Strayhorn estate); see Van de Leur, Something, 212–13.
Some handwritten notes for Drum are written on stationery from Chicago’s Sherman Hotel;
while attempting to date such artifacts based on band itineraries is conjectural at best,
Ellington was in Chicago during the first week of September 1956. See Wilhelm Ernst Timner,
Ellingtonia: The Recorded Music of Duke Ellington and His Sidemen (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow
Press, 2007), 649. Based on the evidence of its narrative sequence and its frequent phonetic
inaccuracies, the West German script appears to comprise an aural transcription of the album
along with staging notes that incorporate some elements of the telecast. Notably, the latter
include a suggested “52nd Street Ballet” sequence that was not included in the album. A
“Still Gaudy”
Narrated by Ellington, A Drum Is a Woman depicts the history of jazz music

as embodied by the alluring “Madame Zajj,” who also takes the form of a
talking drum as it/she is transmitted to “Carribee Joe,” the embodiment
of African and African American musicians in different historical epochs
and geographic locations.19 Described by Feather as a “jazz-tinged opera-
cum-ballet,” the program’s narrative locales, musical numbers, and solo
features are outlined in Table 9.1.20
There is a long and significant body of jazz criticism and commentary
that has characterized the programmatic theater medium as an embod-
iment of commercial entertainment ideals antithetical to conceptions of
“authentic” jazz or the work of a “true” composer.21 In a 1959 interview,
Ellington responds to similar charges in his commentary on the recep-
tion of Drum: “when you combine [jazz] with voices, and you make a
fanfare like Madame Zajj coming out of the flying saucer, well [critics]
don’t think this is jazz.”22 By contrast, Graham Lock’s suggestion that
possible timeframe for the West German script is offered by a January 1961 interview in Paris,
where Ellington apparently refers to A Drum Is a Woman in the future tense. See Hajdu, Lush,
157–8.
19 The spelling of “jazz” in reverse as “Zajj” represents a favorite game of Ellington’s; both
Ellington and Strayhorn exercised name reversals with titles like “Snibor” (“Rob[b]ins,” a
reference to one of Strayhorn’s favorite jazz radio programs), “Amad” (“Dama,” a reference to
Damascus), and “Oclupaca” (“Acapulco”).
20 Leonard Feather, “Ella Meets the Duke,” Playboy, November 1957, 72. There were two different
pressings of the A Drum Is a Woman CL 951 album released in early 1957. The first was a
quickly cancelled version with some tracks erroneously duplicated and omitted, and with
different narration edits than those used in the second issue. See Benny Aasland, Lars Ulrich
Hill, and Ove Wilson, “The Same Woman – But Different!,” Duke Ellington Music Society,
February 2003, 18. See also Sjef Hoefsmit, “Undubbed Tracks from A Drum Is a Woman,” Duke
Ellington Music Society, March 2004, 14. Descriptions of the A Drum Is a Woman album
throughout refer to the European CD reissue of the second LP issue, Duke Ellington, A Drum
Is a Woman, Jazz Track 933, 2008, compact disc. Descriptions of the telecast refer to Duke
Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, “Duke Ellington’s A Drum Is a Woman,” U.S. Steel Hour, CBS, 8
May 1957, VHS copy of Kinescope dub held in the Paley Center for Media, New York.
21 For example, Gunther Schuller finds it necessary to ask “how did Ellington, at first a musician
with a decided leaning toward ‘show music,’ develop into one of America’s foremost
composers?” in Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (1968; reprint,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 339. See also Hsio Wen Shih’s assertion that “the
show-bands . . . had no wide influence [in jazz]” in “The Spread of Jazz and the Big Bands,” in
Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of Jazz by Twelve of the World’s Foremost Jazz Critics and
Scholars, ed. Nat Hentoff and Albert McCarthy (1959; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press,
1975): 181–2.
22 Duke Ellington, interview by Charles Melville, as quoted in Steve Voce, “Quoth the Duke,” Jazz
Journal International, March 1959, 3.
270 john wriggle
Table 9.1 A Drum Is a Woman album and telecast sequences
Columbia CL 951 [vsn. 2] (rec. CBS U.S. Steel Hour (8 May 1957)∗∗
Sept.–Dec. 1956)∗
Part 1 Act I
“A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” [Africa?]
Drum solo
“A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” [mm. 1–10]
Africa Narration (offscreen) + drums
“Rhythm Pum Te Dum” Solo/Ensemble dance: Camero solo
Orchestra and clarinet segue
Duo/Ensemble dance: Camero solo
Orchestra woodwind segue (“Carabe Background”)
Barbados Barbados
Narration + vocals, drums “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” [piano intro only]
“What Else Can You Do with a Drum?” Narration (onscreen) + drums
“Rhythm Pum Te Dum” [percussion intro only]
“What Else Can You Do with a Drum?”: 8-bar intro
repeated
Part 2
New Orleans New Orleans
Narration/“New Orleans (Sunrise)” Narration (onscreen) + drums
“New Orleans (Mardi Gras)” “New Orleans (Sunrise)”
Narration/“Hey, Buddy Bolden” “New Orleans (Mardi Gras)”
“Carribee Joe Part 1” Ensemble dance/“Hey, Buddy Bolden”
Narration/“Congo Square (Silence, Solo dance/“Carribee Joe Part 1”
Matumbe, Mme Zajj Entrance)”
Narration/“New Orleans (Sunrise)” Act II
Narration (offscreen)
Ensemble dance/“Congo Square (Silence, Matumbe)”:
“Matumbe” extended [8 bars drums + mm. 43–51;
8 bars drums + mm. 19–24; drums + mm. 1–18?];
omits Gonsalves “Mme Zajj Entrance” solo
Part 3
[Chicago?] Chicago
“A Drum Is a Woman Part 2” Narration (onscreen) + drums
“You Better Know It” “Madame Zajj”
“You Better Know It”
Table 9.1 (cont.)
The World
Narration/“Madame Zajj” New York City
Narration (onscreen) + piano
The Moon Ensemble dance/“Rhumbop” [combo]: Terry solo
Narration “Zajj’s Dream” [fanfare only]
“Ballet of the Flying Saucers” “Rhumbop (Chorus)”: Gonsalves, Terry solo
“Rhumbop”: omits Terry solo
Orchestra segue (“Carabae Joe Ext Z”)
Part 4 Act III
Dream Sequence & New York City “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2” [mm. 33–41]; omits
second portion of Hodges solo
Narration + harp
Narration/“Zajj’s Dream”
Narration [Dream Sequence]
“Rhumbop” Narration (onscreen)
Narration + piano/“Carribee Joe Part 2” Duo dance/“Pomegranate”: Bailey vocal
Orchestra segue “Carribee Joe (Part 2)” [mm. 15–23]
The Moon
Narration (onscreen) + chimes
Ensemble dance “Ballet of the Flying Saucers”
Narration (onscreen)
Finale Finale
“Finale” “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” [complete]
“You Better Know It” [instrumental]: Ellington solo;
omits Bailey vocal
∗
See CL 951 for personnel and solo features; Nat Hentoff cites the additional partici-
pation of Louie Bellson on percussion (“The Duke,” Down Beat, 26 December 1956,
12).
∗∗
Solo features are the same as the album except as noted. Performances not represented
in the album are in italics. All of Ellington’s narration, backed by Candido Camero’s
conga (not bongo) drum accompaniment, is performed live. Some of the telecast
performances of previously recorded arrangements (such as “Zajj’s Dream” [fanfare]
and “Pomegranate” [a.k.a. “On Credit”]) also include additional accompaniment by
Camero. Other live orchestra performances include four brief segues, all versions of
“Rhumbop,” the finale performances of “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” and “You Better
Know It,” and possibly Clark Terry’s “Madame Zajj” solo (the bass accompaniment is
absent or inaudible). Marks on surviving orchestra parts suggest that the last edited
extension of “Congo Square (Matumbe)” – material not heard on the album – stems
from the original album recording session. Bracketed measure numbers of edited
album arrangements reflect (as closely as possible) presentation scores created at a
later date, for lack of a more consistent source.
272 john wriggle
the aesthetic of Drum “was actually a potent affirmation of ‘nearly every-

thing’ that [Ellington] had stood for” highlights the potential folly in such
subjectively purist criticism.23 Lock’s view resonates with the reflective-
testimonial and creative-renewal arguments proposed here, but is perhaps
overstated. Drum does not require qualification as a “hybrid,” “allegory,”
or even “riposte,” though it may indeed be all these things; nor need it be
enigmatically “difficult to categorize.”24 It is quite clearly a revue, a stage
genre that Ellington had a long history of involvement with, and a genre
that was foundational for a long and venerable tradition of black Amer-
ican entertainment. This genre recognition does not diminish Drum’s
individuality, invention, or significance, but it is important in addressing
its content and design.
John Howland traces the development of urban black entertainment
genres combining music and theater that emerged during the early twen-
tieth century. Among their purposefully mixed entertainment offerings,
stage revues comprising song, dance, and comedy acts out of the vaudeville
tradition also often invoked a “glorified” entertainment aesthetic incorpo-
rating music arranging techniques that emphasized variety and contrast
through juxtaposed and mixed tropes of “high” and “low” culture.25 These
dramatic presentations typically referenced cultural oppositions of white
and black, classical and vernacular, or urban and rural identities. In an
examination of works created by Ellington and other Harlem composers,
Howland identifies four primary elements comprising the period’s black
stage revue productions: “(1) Africa-Dixie-Harlem program topics; (2)
symphonic jazz intermixtures of ‘elevated’ and ‘black’ musical tropes; (3)
the design of ‘production’-style arrangements; and (4) jazz ‘rhapsody’-
themed production numbers.”26
If Swing-era “52nd Street” is allowed to stand in for Jazz Age Harlem,
no further exceptions are required in placing A Drum Is a Woman squarely
within this formula. Parallels in geographic program are offered in Drum’s
23 Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra,
Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 140. Lock
expands upon Peter Gammond’s assertion that Drum is “a summary of all that Ellington stands
for”; see Peter Gammond, Duke Ellington: His Life and Music (London: Phoenix House, 1958),
137.
24 Lock, Blutopia, 139–40. Lock responds to Edward Towler’s criticisms of Drum; see Towler,
“Reflections,” 31.
25 Howland, Uptown, 102–10. Other discussions of “variety and contrast” relating to modes of
popular music arranging during the 1920s include Jeffrey Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing:
Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 39–71, 195.
26 Howland, Uptown, 118.
Africa-Caribbean-New Orleans-New York narrative. Black vernacular ele-

ments of the “New Orleans” sequence – including Russell Procope’s blues
clarinet solo, Ray Nance’s plunger-muted trumpet, and Clark Terry’s trum-
pet “half-valve” technique – contrast against “elevated” European classical
signifiers of Margaret Tynes’s operatic soprano voice and Betty Glamann’s
harp.27 The telecast’s visual imagery of naked, mute jungle “Joe” likewise
serves as foil to that of the tuxedoed, erudite Ellington. Music arranging
devices such as the verse-patter introduction, vamp coda, and vaudevil-
lian cymbal-sting tag of “You Better Know It” pastiche (if not parody) the
Broadway “production”-style idiom. As discussed later, the “Ballet of the
Flying Saucers” number invokes an episodic formal structure referenc-
ing the “rhapsodic” (loosely read, “European concert music”) aesthetics
of symphonic jazz. Ellington presents the history of American popular
music and his own career not only through Drum’s narrative and music,
but through the medium of the presentation itself.
Despite a general acceptance of Ellington’s compositional voice hav-
ing emerged through his work accompanying stage shows, there have
been attempts to portray certain Ellington works as tainted by “show”
music aesthetics.28 Vocal performances are a particularly frequent target
in charges of theatricality;29 perhaps not incidentally, such projects typi-
cally allow for the participation of women, another foil to the traditionally
male-dominated jazz ideal. Although aversions to stage aesthetics have led
some to label Drum as “pompous,” it might be countered that Ellington
recognized the value of pomposity as a dramatic device executed through
an arsenal of musical tools (including fanfares, vamp codas, segues, and
reprises) developed over decades of work in stage shows designed for
27 Procope and Terry’s features within the “New Orleans” sequence are also Drum’s only
performances referencing the 12-bar blues form.
28 For example, Gunther Schuller criticizes some of Ellington’s early Cotton Club-era efforts as
“slick trying-to-be-modern show music”; Barry Ulanov condemns elements of Ellington’s 1944
Carnegie Hall concert as representing a “glorified stage show,” suggesting that programmatic
works like Black, Brown and Beige could be “far more successful . . . without Duke’s relentless
[narrative] programming between selections”; Edward Towler faults portions of Drum which
he believes assume “all the proportions of those extravaganzas so familiar to the Hollywood
‘musical’”; Walter van de Leur dismisses Drum as “a mixed bag of quasi-Caribbean numbers
and showy theater music”; and Harvey Cohen describes Drum as “a slick show-biz production.”
Schuller, Early, 330, see also 339–40; Barry Ulanov, “Ellington’s Carnegie Hall Concert a
Glorified Stage Show,” Metronome, January 1944, 8; Towler, “Reflections,” 31; Van de Leur,
Something, 134; Cohen, America, 330, emphasis added in all five citations.
29 For instance, Strayhorn biographer David Hajdu, who generally praises Drum, nonetheless
believes that its musical “high points are the least [narrative] referential instrumental
selections.” Hajdu, Lush, 159, emphasis added. For an example of criticism regarding the vocal
content of Ellington’s later works, see Collier, Duke, 293–5.
274 john wriggle
broad popular audiences.30 The titling of Drum’s “Flying Saucers” num-

ber as a “ballet,” referencing highbrow European art, certainly acknowl-
edges some understanding of American middlebrow aesthetics.31 Backed
by “symphonic” bell and harp scoring, the telecast’s “Flying Saucers”
ensemble dance sequence stands as unapologetically pompous as any of
Gene Kelly’s popularly successful modern dance sequences for his MGM
films (e.g., the 1951 American in Paris or 1952 Singin’ in the Rain). Such
strategies were as familiar to Ellington as they were effective. A relevant
precedent for the Drum telecast’s “Pomegranate” duo dance sequence
can be found in the film accompanying Strayhorn’s 1941 arrangement of
“Flamingo” (a popular hit for Ellington and his “singing cowboy” crooner,
Herb Jeffries), which featured interpretive ballet choreography performed
by Drum’s “Joe” dancer Talley Beatty.32
Co-writer Billy Strayhorn’s career-long involvement in theater, includ-
ing a brief period as a stage show producer, represents another critical fac-
tor in Drum’s construction. His own theatrical endeavors notably involved
prior work with both Beatty and Orson Welles (whose connection to Drum
is discussed later).33 Strayhorn’s later claim that Drum represented his
and Ellington’s “closest ever” collaboration implies a measure of personal
pride in the artistic significance of the resulting work, if not the degree
of its success.34 Despite this, and in spite of a growing number of studies
devoted to Strayhorn’s music, his specific contributions to Drum – which
include at least half of the project’s orchestrations – remain an area ripe
for investigation.35
30 The description of Drum as “pompous” is offered in Stratemann, Day, 376.
31 The West German script is more explicit, specifying the insertion of “an important piece of
ballet.” West German script, 44, emphasis added.
32 The “Flamingo” soundie has been issued on Duke Ellington [and] Lionel Hampton, Idem IDVD
1023NT, 2003, DVD. Beatty’s dance partner in “Flamingo” was Janet Collins, a cousin of Drum
dancer Carmen de Lavallade. See Patricia Willard, “Dance: The Unsung Element of
Ellingtonia,” The Antioch Review 57 (Summer 1999): 405.
33 Regarding Strayhorn’s theater collaborations, see Hajdu, Lush, 107–37.
34 Van de Leur, Something, 134. See also Nicholson, Reminiscing, 312.
35 Arranging credits for most of Drum’s component pieces are listed in Van de Leur, Something,
212–13. In addition to Van de Leur’s listing of Strayhorn manuscript scores, the Duke Ellington
Collection holds Strayhorn manuscripts reflecting the telecast segue “Carabe Background,” the
piano introduction to “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2,” and a lead sheet and sketch of the
introduction to “You Better Know It”; Ellington manuscripts in the Duke Ellington Collection
include material for “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1,” “New Orleans (Sunrise)” [Early Morning],
“New Orleans (Mardi Gras)” [New Orleanna], “Hey, Buddy Bolden,” “Congo Square
(Silence),” telecast versions of “Rhumbop,” the beginning and ending of “Carribee Joe Part 2,”
and the telecast segue “Carabae Joe Ext Z.” Drum orchestra parts held in the Duke Ellington
Collection also reflect the contributions of Ellington music copyists Tom Whaley and John
Sanders.
John Franceschina prefaces his study of Ellington’s stage works by sug-

gesting that “those who find Ellington’s theatre compositions inferior to
Duke’s band work can now have firm evidence of the importance of his
maintaining control over his material.”36 Drum, however, offers some
complications regarding the issue of authorial control. One of the first
issues confronting any examination of this project is the reconciliation
of the telecast presentation with the album; while the two productions
are generally parallel in musical and narrative content, there are also sig-
nificant differences. Moreover, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the
Drum telecast’s visual production concerns became a determinant factor
in Ellington’s planning.37 Ellington appears to have maintained a large
degree of control over the sequence and content of the original album,
including extensive editing and overdubs.38
Any critical notions of Ellington’s authorial control over the develop-
ment and production of the telecast presentation are more dubious. Some
alterations had to have been expected. For example, the division of the
telecast into three “acts,” as opposed to the four “parts” of the album,
likely reflects a convenience for scheduled advertising breaks rather than
any conscious restructuring of narrative. Evidence of the rejected script
suggests that Ellington may have enjoyed a genuine power of approval
regarding the telecast content. However, some degree of trepidation peeks
from behind Ellington’s statement that “we’re pulling the whole record
apart and putting it back together for TV . . . I do not have any previous
notions about my music and I don’t regret having to tear it up even though
I think it is the best thing I’ve ever done.”39
Claims that Drum was “the biggest, the most advertised, and the most
pretentious show of its kind ever attempted on a commercial or other-
wise sponsored show” may tend toward hyperbole, but the telecast was
heavily promoted.40 One of the first multimedia packages of its kind, CBS
36 John Franceschina, Duke Ellington’s Music for the Theatre (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 10.
Examination of Drum is precluded from Franceschina’s study, apparently on grounds of the
production’s presentation on television. Ibid., 204n10.
37 Hajdu proposes that the telecast project was initiated when Theatre Guild administrator
Lawrence Langer “approached Ellington.” Hajdu, Lush, 157. Exactly when this initial contact
took place is unclear; to date, I have located no publicity mentioning the Drum telecast prior to
February 1957. Ellington later claimed that he made the record “so maybe someone would
want to do it on TV.” “TV–Radio: ‘Crazy Little Story,’” Newsweek, 6 May 1957, 66.
38 The exact combination of takes and edits used in Drum remains unclear; see Timner,
Ellingtonia, 171–5.
39 William Ewald, “Duke Ellington Invades TV Drama Hour Soon,” News-Herald [Del Rio,
Texas], 2 May 1957, on file at the IJS.
40 Izzy Rowe, “One Dug Duke, Another Didn’t,” Pittsburgh Courier, 18 May 1957, 23.
276 john wriggle
carefully tracked its promotional efforts and critical responses. The net-
work cited a production cost of $80,000, including the development of a
45-rpm “promotional recording” that was sent to 300 television and radio
stations, 200 public relations contacts, and 6,500 U.S. Steel customers;
copies of a promotional LP album were additionally sent to 150 “key TV
critics.”41 In the weeks leading up to the broadcast, telephone interviews
with Ellington were scheduled with reviewers nationwide. Over eighty
television and radio stations were tracked to document their number of
on-air announcements; local newspaper advertisements and record dealer
tie-ins were also documented. The latter efforts included at least one com-
petition where contestants were invited to submit “letters telling why a
drum is like a woman”; the first prize was a set of bongo drums.42
But the respectable budget and “hefty ad campaign” would not guaran-
tee commercial success.43 While Drum’s Nielson-tracked audience of 14.2
percent of American television households may sound enviable for jazz
or musical theater efforts today, David Hajdu suggests that these numbers
“fizzled” by comparison to other U.S. Steel productions.44 A week before
the telecast, Ellington had vowed that “what happens with this TV show
will make several decisions for us.”45 Whether by his own decision, or
the directive of network producers, Ellington would not present another
complete “extended” work on American television, theatrical or other-
wise, until the 1965 Concert of Sacred Music (an event broadcast over
public television, not a commercial network).46
“As Far Back as Way Back Goes”
Although most contemporary media reviews of Drum were mixed at

worst – indeed, some (mostly non-jazz) critics gave rave reviews – any-
thing less than the unbridled success of At Newport was bound to be
disappointing.47 From the vantage point of a half century later, perhaps
41 “U.S. Steel Hour Advertising and Promotion, A Drum Is a Woman,” Duke Ellington
Collection, Series 4, box 1. See also “Col, U.S. Steel and BBDO”; Timner, Ellingtonia, 376.
42 “U.S. Steel Hour Advertising.” 43 “Col., U.S. Steel and BBDO.”
44 The Nielson rating share accounted for approximately 5.2 million screens. Hajdu, Lush, 163.
45 “TV–Radio: ‘Crazy Little Story.’”
46 The Sacred Concert, as filmed by KQED of San Francisco, has been issued in full on Duke
Ellington, Love You Madly/A Concert of Sacred Music, Eagle Eye Media EE39100–9, 2005, DVD.
47 This comparison was explicit for New York Times critic and radio deejay John S. Wilson, who
felt that the “promise” of Newport “seemed to turn to ashes” with the “debacle” of Drum.
Wilson, “Jazz: Ellington.” By contrast, according to Paul Sampson, the Drum album
one of the most difficult-to-grasp critical complaints against the produc-

tion is that of its “complicated” story line or “elusive” allegory.48 But
Drum’s historical narrative carries its own circuitous legacy. Among the
varied synopses Ellington had previously offered for his long-planned
“tone parallel” depiction of an “everyman” African American experience –
a never fully realized, career-long project idea that was first mentioned
in the 1930s and whose themes were partially manifest in works such
as Black, Brown and Beige (hereafter “BB&B”) and the unproduced and
incomplete opera Boola – is one conception that strongly foreshadows the
storyline of Drum. In a 1942 issue of Variety magazine, Ellington describes
a jazz symphony: “the first movement will show the origin of Negro music,
with an African tom-tom beat as a background; the second will show the
development of early American jazz; the third present day swing, and then
a futuristic finale, all four parts tied together with the beat of the original
tom-tom.”49
Although published in near parallel to the completion of BB&B (and,
indeed, this statement equally suggests several key narrative themes in
the subsequent program of BB&B), the narrative described in Variety
might tie more closely to a film project that Ellington and the film/theater
director Orson Welles had planned the previous year – a provenance
teased in numerous accounts of the Drum project.50 Ellington had met
Welles in Los Angeles during the summer 1941 run of Jump for Joy, a
stage revue that featured Ellington as composer-bandleader, and notably
included an overture titled “Evolution of Rhythm.” This number presented
a capsule history of jazz through a sequence depicting “a trio of native
Africans (circa 1800),” a “quartette of Afro-Cuban drummers,” Ellington’s
drummer Sonny Greer performing “a short drum concerto against the beat
of the other drums,” and closing with “Ellington conducting his entire
orchestra . . . with a hot rendition of one of the rhythm tunes from the
show.”51
represented “entertainment in the best sense of the word”; Paul Sampson, “In the Groove:
Columbia Still Dispensing Gems of Jazz,” Washington Post, 7 April 1957, H11. Among other
sources, a number of additional Drum reviews are on file at IJS, and in the Duke Ellington
Collection, Series 10, box 2. See also Cohen, America, 333.
48 Jack Gould, “TV Review: Jazz Fantasy, ‘A Drum Is a Woman,’ Staged,” New York Times, 9 May
1957, 48; Walter Hawver, “TV-Radio in Review: Duke Soared Too High; Cloud 9
Overpopulated,” Albany Knickerbocker, 9 May 1957, on file at IJS.
49 “Ellington on Negro Music,” Variety, 9 December 1942, 37. See also Tucker, “Genesis,” 78n12.
50 For example, see Irving Townsend, liner notes to A Drum Is a Woman, Columbia CL951, 1956,
LP.
51 “Tentative Outline of Jump for Joy; A Musical Revue,” Duke Ellington Collection, Series 4, box
6. In the Jump for Joy program reprinted in Ellington’s autobiography, the drum-feature
278 john wriggle
According to Ellington, Welles was impressed by Jump for Joy and

approached the bandleader soon after the show opened.52 The proposed
Ellington-Welles production was to be one of four segments compris-
ing Welles’s massive (and never completed) film project, It’s All True.53
Their “Story of Jazz” segment was slated to utilize Ellington as script
advisor, composer, and conductor, and Welles planned to feature appear-
ances by Louis Armstrong, Hazel Scott (in the role of Armstrong’s wife,
pianist Lil Hardin), and potentially Ellington himself.54 A 1941 article
briefly describes the film as “tracing the history of Jazz to the Negro, and
featuring the life of Louis Armstrong, King of Trumpeteers.”55 Catherine
Benamou’s study of the It’s All True project describes a draft script storyline
following Armstrong “from a Mississippi riverboat to Chicago, New York,
and Western Europe, all joined by Ellington’s original sound track.”56 Yet
Townsend’s liner notes for Drum qualify the album’s connection to It’s All
True, claiming that “little more than an outline had been prepared [for
Welles], and this outline was dug out and completely revamped” for the
project at hand.57
The basic storyline of Drum resurfaced again in Ellington’s foreword
to Leonard Feather’s 1955 Encyclopedia of Jazz, where it is remarked that
“rhythm” travels from Africa to America, stops in the West Indies, then
takes “two courses.” One course travels to New Orleans and up the Missis-
sippi River to Chicago “in the form of clarinets, trombones, and trumpets”;
sequence appears to be included as part of the opening number, “Sun-Tanned Tenth of the
Nation.” Ellington, Mistress, 178.
52 Duke Ellington, foreword to Leonard Feather (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Jazz (New York:
Horizon Press, 1955), 10.
53 Filming for the Ellington–Welles production was scheduled for December 1941, but never
initiated. See Catherine Benamou, It’s All True: Orson Welles’s Pan-American Odyssey (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 29.
54 Ibid., 27–9. Although Welles’s plans for the film seem to have changed early in the production
process, Ellington remained under contract with Mercury Productions from July 1941 through
July 1942. Ibid., 325n25. Robert Stam offers observations on the broader musical conception
behind It’s All True in “Orson Welles, Brazil, and the Power of Blackness,” in Perspectives on
Orson Welles, ed. Morris Beja (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), 237.
55 John Pittman, “The Duke Will Stay on Top!,” in Tucker, Reader, 149.
56 Benamou, It’s All True, 29.
57 Townsend, liner notes. In his Time magazine feature, Ellington seems to minimize the
connection between It’s All True and his upcoming Drum project, claiming that “I wrote a
piece of music [for Welles] . . . just 28 bars. . . . And I lost it.” “Mood Indigo and Beyond,” 60. He
also downplays the connection in his autobiography, explaining: “I’m not sure of the
relationship . . . because a lot of time elapsed between Jump for Joy and A Drum Is a Woman.”
Ellington, Mistress, 240. Nevertheless, both Ellington and his interviewers and chroniclers
appear to have exploited every opportunity to cite the Welles connection in discussions of
Drum.
the other travels up the East Coast, favoring “strings.” Regarding the lat-
ter course, Ellington also cites the “great piano players . . . always on the
East Coast,” including his personal mentors James P. Johnson and Willie
“The Lion” Smith. This championing of the less-storied Eastern tradition
might be read as an attempt by Ellington to reinforce his own position
in jazz history, as he concludes that the Eastern and Western courses
“converged in New York and blended together, and the offspring was
jazz.”58
Handwritten notes for Drum again reference this two-course lineage, as
Ellington writes that each branch “went a different way to meet again on
another day,” with the Eastern branch traveling “from Cuba to New York.”
Further editing of the Drum storyline, however, placed more emphasis on
the familiar Western (or perhaps “Armstrong”) branch: aside from a vio-
lin solo by Ray Nance and the introduction of percussion instruments
referencing the Afro-Cuban tradition in “Zajj’s Dream” (performances
omitted from the telecast), Ellington’s aforementioned East Coast story
of jazz receives little attention in his final Drum presentation. But initial
attempts at representing a two-course storyline may be responsible for the
arguably awkward twist in the Drum album narrative. Following a chrono-
logical presentation of jazz history from Africa to a futuristic “Ballet of the
Flying Saucers,” the album’s storyline backtracks to Swing-era 52nd Street
in New York, thereby squeezing in the Afro-Cuban references of “Zajj’s
Dream” and “Rhumbop” before arriving at the apotheosis “Finale.”59
Motivation for this narrative development is not made entirely clear in
Drum’s narration or liner notes; the dream device seems more convinc-
ingly incorporated through the visual capabilities of the telecast (which
employed a cinematic “flashback” camera dissolve and smoke effect).60 In
any case, the telecast production positions the “Flying Saucers” sequence
after 52nd Street and “Rhumbop,” reorganizing the storyline into one
single-course chronological narrative.
A January 1957 article in Billboard suggested parallels between a newly
expanding jazz LP market and the recent appearance of a string of influ-
ential, now-canonical jazz history books, such as Nat Shapiro and Nat
Hentoff’s Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya (1955), Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz
58 Duke Ellington, foreword to Feather, Encyclopedia, 12, emphasis added.

59 The West German script specifies the 52nd Street setting for “Rhumbop” as “between 1930 and
1940.” West German script, 52.
60 Townsend’s liner notes read: “in her [Madame Zajj’s] dream, she lures Carribee Joe to New
York and tempts him with the neon of 52nd Street . . . But Joe’s trip to New York is only a
dream, and Zajj is without him.”
280 john wriggle
(1955), and Marshall Stearns’s The Story of Jazz (1956).61 In writing the
foreword to Feather’s publication, Ellington was enjoying (albeit with his
future career at stake) the inclusion of his own legacy in the rising field of
jazz history. Ellington’s embodiment of “Joe” at the climax of the Drum
telecast – he physically picks up the Zajj-drum, asking “whose pretty little
drum are you?” – positions the maestro and his band on a plane with
Buddy Bolden and mother Africa, all of which function as figurative jazz
history concepts as much as explicitly documented events.
But the nation-wide audience of the CBS telecast was not confined to
history buffs, nightclubbing readers of Down Beat, or even music fans.
For non-jazz-connoisseurs circa 1957, Drum’s shifting geographic and
temporal locations or musical styles may well have been perplexing. As
one reviewer confessed, the Drum telecast material “even stripped of its
fanciful trappings, was for the jazz layman, at least, pretty heady stuff.”62
Drum’s identification of the (still) obscure Bolden, for example, is tersely
explained in the album liner notes as “the legendary trumpeter,” while
lyrics for the song “Hey, Buddy Bolden” describe the subject more as a
pimp with “one woman on each arm” than as a musical influence on better-
known New Orleans jazz pioneers – a now mythological jazz-history story
that is never even mentioned in Drum’s narration or synopses.63
A possible connection with Louis Armstrong, also unnamed, was less of
a stretch: even audiences of limited jazz awareness may have been familiar
with Armstrong’s film appearance in New Orleans (United Artists, 1947),
or Time magazine’s coverage of his 1949 crowning as New Orleans’s “King
of the Zulus.”64 But Armstrong fans might have been puzzled by “Hey,
Buddy Bolden” trumpet soloist Clark Terry’s bebop-inflected chromati-
cism or subtle “St. Louis sound,” which was identified with a mellow
timbre, straight tone, and (or) smooth articulation (traits shared with
Terry’s St. Louis brethren Harold Baker and Miles Davis). Such prominent
61 Bill Simon, “Jazz in ’56 Trades Esoteric for New Big Business Look,” Billboard, 19 January 1957,
1, 14, 28. Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz and the Men
Who Made It (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1955); Feather, Encyclopedia; and Marshall
Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). Other jazz history
publications appearing at this time include Andre Hodeir’s Jazz, Its Evolution and Essence (New
York: Grove Press, 1956), and Hugues Panassié’s and Madeleine Gautier’s Guide to Jazz
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956). Also of interest to contemporary critics was the reissue of
historical jazz recordings on LP. See, for instance, John Wilson, “Jazz Styles Revived,” New York
Times, 23 September 1956, 138.
62 Hawver, “Duke Soared.”
63 Townsend, liner notes. Ellington’s depiction of Bolden seems to reflect descriptions compiled
in Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me, 36–9.
64 “Music: Louis the First,” Time, 21 February 1949, 52.
stylistic differences were presumably recognized because of their perceived

ambivalence to Armstrong’s ubiquitous influence.65 Following the script’s
“you could hear him ’cross the river” imagery (and some plunger-muted
responses from Ray Nance), the decision to highlight Terry’s intimate
sound – additionally shaded with halve-valve technique – was certainly
as atypical as it may have been hip.66 Ellington regularly made reference
to the geographic origins of his sidemen, and might have noted that St.
Louis lies across as well as up the river from New Orleans.67
While Ellington’s narration may presume a fair amount of knowledge
regarding jazz styles and personalities, physical geography is also an issue.
Curiously, the album fails to identify any geographic locale in relation to
the song “You Better Know It.”68 The eventual Chicago cabaret setting
of the telecast does reflect Ellington’s handwritten notes for the album,
which had specified a Chicago sequence with the song “The Greatest There
Is (He’s a Whiz)” (recorded, but cut from the project).69 It is unclear if
the telecast’s subsequent specificity of Chicago for “You Better Know
It” merely reflects a concern over returning to the original geographic
trajectory of the storyline, or if Ellington was consciously attempting to
generalize the narrative of the album, thereby abandoning the potential
Armstrong biography parallels to accommodate a broader concept of the
Great Migration – and Ellington’s own biography.70 Another ambiguity
65 More generally, one contemporary commentator responded that they “didn’t dig the modern
sounds [in Drum].” Evelyn Cunningham, “One Dug Duke, Another Didn’t,” Pittsburgh
Courier, 18 May 1957, 23. Regarding conceptions of the “St. Louis sound,” see Alyn Shipton, A
New History of Jazz, rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 2007), 470–1.
66 By contrast, Ellington’s bravura trumpeter Cat Anderson is heard under narration in the
album’s preceding New Orleans Mardi Gras parade sequence. Eddie Lambert takes the
assignment of Bolden to Terry a bit further, citing it as one of the “stinging asides” in “Hey,
Buddy Bolden,” and something which he felt was specifically “fired in the direction of the
clichés of the American musical.” Eddie Lambert, Duke Ellington: A Listener’s Guide (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press and Institute of Jazz Studies, 1999), 192.
67 While any suggestion that Terry himself was intended to represent Drum’s segue from New
Orleans to Chicago is conjectural, Ellington was well aware of Terry’s St. Louis roots; see
Ellington, Mistress, 229. One version of Terry’s recollections of Ellington convincing him to
portray Bolden in Drum can be found in Terry’s interview with Susan Miller and Bob Rusch,
Cadence 3 (November 1977), 4. Terry’s half-valve technique also represented the extension of
an Ellington orchestra tradition established by trumpeter Rex Stewart during the 1930s and
1940s; the connection via Terry’s “Bolden” performance is noted in Tracy, “Jazz Records,” 26.
68 The West German script suggests “You Better Know It” as transpiring in New Orleans. West
German script, 35–6.
69 See also Timner, Ellingtonia, 173.
70 In addition to the original plans for the It’s All True project, Armstrong’s connection to
Columbia Records during the mid-1950s – as well as his historic visit to the Gold Coast in the
spring of 1956 – makes his name’s omission from Drum all the more notable. The trumpeter’s
282 john wriggle
arises with the omission of “Rhythm Pum Te Dum’s” lyrics from the
telecast, leaving the continent of Joe’s jungle origins unidentified.
“Jungle Gyration with Bop Animation”
Drum’s rarified status as Civil Rights-era mass media inevitably placed it

under a political magnifying glass. Although Norman Weinstein cites the
poetic power of the “imaginative image” to justify the Drum album script’s
“elliptical and occasionally cryptic nature,” the visual imagery of the tele-
cast appears to have suggested a greater (if perhaps unintended) degree of
realism for the audience.71 Scantily attired in pseudo-loincloth or feath-
ers, images of Joe and Madame Zajj – whose initial costume recalls that of
1920s Cotton Club chorus dancers – were accused of invoking offensive
tropes on African Americans and primitivism.72 Even as some commen-
tators celebrated the all-black presentation as a political coup, a New York
Times reviewer complained of the telecast’s “regrettably stereotyped roles,”
and a writer for the Pittsburgh Courier charged that the program’s “display
of sex, love, and flesh was a ‘jungle minstrel’ that will set back integration
another 25 years.”73 Elsewhere, Ellington’s narration of rhyming “jive”
poetry was suggested to reinforce beatnik “finger-snapping” caricatures
of urban black culture.74 By extension, the script’s reference to the “King
of the Zulus” – a figure under renewed attack in the 1950s black press
for its parallels to blackface minstrelsy – takes an interesting twist in the
portrayal in the Civil Rights-era black press as an “Uncle Tom” may have also prompted the
narrative focus on Bolden; then again, Armstrong’s relationship with Columbia had recently
terminated under sour conditions (in fact, almost simultaneous with Ellington’s 1956 Newport
triumph). Regarding criticism of Armstrong by Ellington and Strayhorn, the black press, the
African tour, and the Columbia dispute, see Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The
Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (New York: Pantheon, 2011), xviii, 58–61, 125–32, 134–5.
71 Norman Weinstein, A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow,
1992), 44–5.
72 Pertinent examples of 1920s Cotton Club–style floorshow costumes are documented in
Ellington’s 1929 RKO short film, Black and Tan (RKO, 1929). As of this writing, Life magazine
photos of a rehearsal for the telecast production of A Drum Is a Woman can be accessed
through Google Images, http://images.google.com/images?q=drum+is+a+woman&q=source
%3Alife, accessed 16 September 2015.
73 Gould, “TV Review: Jazz Fantasy”; “What Courier Readers Think: George F. Brown Called
‘Fearless,’” Pittsburgh Courier, 31 August 1957, 5.
74 See Dan Burley, “Back Door Stuff: The Way the Ball Bounces,” New York Amsterdam News, 18
May 1957, 13. Ellington later parodied finger-snapping hipsters in his own onstage
monologues; for example, see the 1965 performance of “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be”
included in Duke Ellington, Love You Madly, Eagle Eye Media EE39100–9, 2005, DVD.
telecast as Ray Nance wears a harlequin mask instead of face paint.75 But
if Drum’s references to primitivism, “jive,” or the “King of the Zulus”
might be read to represent an ironic commentary on racist stereotypes,
they were not consistently received as such when viewed on prime-time
television.
In comparison to the above controversial elements, the Drum telecast’s
Barbados sequence drew less attention with its “colonial” costumes of
tattered short-pants and straw hats, each of which were extensions of the
1950s American pop-calypso vogue.76 Drum’s inclusion of calypso music
is notable within Ellington’s vision of jazz history; Weinstein praises Elling-
ton’s celebration of Caribbean heritage within the album’s African Ameri-
can narrative, discussing the context of early twentieth-century Garveyite
black nationalism.77 But aside from fulfilling the West Indies/Caribbean
element of Drum’s storyline, the decision to use calypso music was – in
1956 – a commercial no-brainer. While calypso had made inroads into the
American popular market since the 1930s, and had been incorporated by
jazz performers through the 1940s (e.g., Louis Jordan’s 1948 “Run Joe”),
the May 1956 RCA Victor release of Harry Belafonte’s Calypso album
ignited a national phenomenon.78 Calypso remained in Billboard’s top-
ten best selling bracket for a full year, spawning scores of imitators and
calypso invasions into almost every entertainment medium (e.g., Bel-Air’s
1957 film Bop Girl Goes Calypso).79
With the idiom stripped of its traditionally subversive political con-
tent, the American popular music industry’s take on calypso during this
period offers discomforting parallels with preceding Tin Pan Alley com-
mercial song formulas. Many attempts to follow Belafonte’s success feature
not only folk-like melodies and call-and-response patterns, but a stylized
75 See George E. Pitts, “Around the Theatrical World: Ridiculous ‘King Zulu’ Still Mars Mardi
Gras!,” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 March 1957, 22.
76 For other examples of “calypso” attire, see Nat Cole’s performance of “Calypso Blues” in the
film Rhythm and Blues Revue (Studio Films, 1955), or former Ellington vocalist Herb Jeffries’s
film Calypso Joe (Allied Artists, 1957). The guitar carried by West Indian Joe in the Drum
telecast is also part of this imagery; the instrument is not actually heard in any of the
production’s music.
77 Weinstein, Night in Tunisia, 39–42.
78 Regarding calypso’s early emergences in the U.S. market, see Michael Eldridge, “There Goes
the Transnational Neighborhood: Calypso Buys a Bungalo,” Callaloo 25 (Spring 2002): 620–38.
79 Belafonte’s Calypso album (RCA LPM-1248, 1956, LP) remained on Billboard’s top ten lists
through May 1957. See “Music Popularity Charts: Best Selling Pop Albums,” Billboard, 27 May
1957, 31. Descriptions of the Belafonte-inspired calypso “epidemic” include John S. Wilson,
“Belafonte and Others in Calypso Variety,” New York Times, 5 May 1957, 145; see also
“Belafonte ‘da Beeg’ Man in Calypso,” Pittsburgh Courier, 16 February 1957, 22.
284 john wriggle
formula of West Indian (or, in cruder forms, simply broken-English)

dialect and buffoonish depictions of Caribbean blacks.80 Not surprisingly,
certain comedic calypso tropes (such as the protagonist getting retribu-
tively “hit on de head” with a kitchen item) played well with mainstream
audiences, offering updated vehicles for more traditional modes of race-
based condescension.81
Vocalist Ozzie Bailey’s Trinidadian ancestry may have been a factor
in his joining the Ellington band upon commencement of the Drum
recording sessions in September 1956.82 Bailey performed his featured
numbers from this work (“You Better Know It” and the calypso “What
Else Can You Do with a Drum?”) throughout his four-year association
with the orchestra.83 Although Strayhorn and Bailey forego the linguistic
affectations of other pop-calypso recordings of the 1950s, “What Else”
clearly cashes in on this idiom’s other hallmark traits – and brilliantly
so, delivering a beautiful call-and-response passage pairing Bailey’s word-
less vocals with Quentin Jackson’s plunger-muted trombone. Strayhorn’s
arrangement presents a pared-down ensemble from the orchestra, loosely
recalling the “combo” texture of BB&B’s “West Indian Dance.”84 The
rhythmically intuitive lyrics also provide some of the project’s clearest
examples of sexist posturing: Joe’s alibi sought behind the line “it isn’t
civilized to beat women . . . but . . . tell me what else can you do with a
drum?” perhaps softens his later admonition “I’ll surely have to spank
you” (delivered in “You Better Know It”).85
80 For different examples of 1950s calypso accents, see the film Calypso Heat Wave (Columbia,
1957), or Robert Mitchum’s 1957 LP Calypso – Is Like So . . . (Capitol T853). Period criticism
of calypso “imposters” is offered in “Folk Singer Says People of Trinidad Prefer United States
Musicians,” Atlanta Daily World, 20 September 1957, 3.
81 Although Belafonte himself focused on less potentially offensive numbers like “The Banana
Boat Song” (a.k.a. “Day-O”) to appease his calypso fans in later decades, he arguably never
fully extricated his career from the marketing formula that made him a household name. One
reviewer charged that a 1993 Belafonte performance “filled with images of island inhabitants
happily harvesting sugar cane . . . played to a 1950s vision of exotic island living that now seems
badly out of place.” Danyel Smith, “Belafonte, Bringing Back Himself and the Memories,” New
York Times, 11 September 1993, 13. Belafonte offers a response to similar criticism in his
autobiography; see Harry Belafonte with Michael Schnayerson, My Song: A Memoir (New York:
Random House, 2011), 164–5.
82 “Duke to Present 2 New Vocalists on TV Show,” Baltimore Afro-American, 4 May 1957, 7.
83 A live performance of “You Better Know It” has been issued on Duke Ellington, Live in ’58, Jazz
Icons 2.119001, 2007, DVD.
84 For a discussion of “West Indian Dance” from BB&B, see Brian Priestley and Alan Cohen,
“Black, Brown and Beige,” in Tucker, Reader, 196–7.
85 As Hajdu suggests, the “attempted” joke of the “What Else” lyrics makes the more subtle
misogyny of other period pop songs sound almost “feminist.” Hajdu, Lush, 159.
“Zajj Was a Lady”
The visions of women presented throughout Drum alternate between

erotic kissing, caressing, and more menacing drum-metaphor imagery
(e.g., “now I am beat and blue for Joe”). Lynn Spigel suggests that com-
plaints of misogyny in the Drum telecast “may well have belied white dis-
comfort with the program’s erotic display of black sexuality on screen.”86
It is true that the telecast script is markedly less leering than that of the
album; Ellington had to have been aware that narration like the album’s
“Congo Square” sequence, including its dubious connotation of “child-
like” faces attached to “not childlike” bodies, was unlikely to be permitted
in a network telecast.87 Ellington’s album script had already been primmed
from earlier handwritten and typewritten notes, which remarked:
A beautiful black woman grinds herself to the center of the clearing – a breath-taking
sight – this gorgeous woman – only half-clothed – here you see the most voluptuous
thing alive – breasts ripe to the bursting – little waistline and the buttocks of a horse –
grinding and looking straight up to the moon and hips grinding so gracefully
and slowly it seems impossible. This is the beginning of a native sex dance –
it gradually accelerates as does everybody’s pulse . . . to frenzy – all night long ’til
finally exhaustion.
Drum’s female characterizations are not easily dismissed through what

some commentators have described as the script’s “dated” quality.88 In
a publicity interview leading up to the telecast, Ellington explained his
Drum Is a Woman metaphor: “you know how it is . . . a musician will say
to his woman – ‘here’s $2, baby, go on down to the tavern or the movies
and leave me alone for a while with the drum.’ And so we say a drum
is a woman – it kind of takes the place of her.”89 But this illustration of
a musician’s relationship with their instrument of trade does not fully
account for Drum’s “male gaze” aesthetic, or even the coy entendre of
lyrics like “Carribee Joe, slept with the jungle and her sounds in the night,
he knew her to her delight.”90 Ellington’s drum/woman imagery is also a
vehicle for expounding a macho bravado, elevating the male musician to
86 Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2008), 55.
87 Regarding the Drum telecast script alterations, Ellington noted: “You don’t have to tell them a
woman is squirming if they can see it right there on the screen.” “TV–Radio: ‘Crazy Little
Story.’”
88 Hasse, Beyond, 362. 89 Ewald, “Duke Ellington Invades.”
90 Theories surrounding the “male gaze” prevalent in Hollywood entertainment aesthetics are
advanced by Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other
286 john wriggle
an insider’s club of superiority – a theme only enhanced by Columbia’s

decision to depict a female’s backside on the Drum album cover.91 This
formulaic positioning of white “come hither” women reflected a preva-
lent LP-era record industry strategy to attract male record buyers – and
to mainstream non-white musicians – through sexual fetishes advanced
by Hollywood and a middle-class bachelor consumer lifestyle.92 Ellington
himself rarely shied away from discussing sex publicly; his attempts to
present his views through humor might be read to reflect a desired asso-
ciation with bohemian concepts of a sexually liberated cultural elite.93
In his embodiment of one of the allegorical “Joes,” alongside the “walk-
ing phallic symbol” imagery of Bolden with his “woman on each arm,”
Ellington certainly appears to position himself (as, apparently, numerous
female fans did) in such a category.94
Ellington also references the female gender in informing his audience
that “though her past was shady, Zajj was a lady. They dressed her in wood-
winds and strings”; handwritten notes ask more succinctly, “was the baby
of ill repute?” The concept of making “a lady” out of the low art of ver-
nacular jazz, a metaphor popularized by symphonic jazz bandleader Paul
Whiteman, has persisted through much of jazz history.95 Contributions
to Drum’s glorified entertainment aesthetic in the form of soprano Tynes
Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), 25. Thanks to Lewis Porter for suggesting this
connection.
91 Regarding other “drum as woman” metaphors in jazz, see Ingrid Monson, Saying Something:
Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 64–6, 223n24.
Poet Jayne Cortez’s response to Ellington’s metaphor is discussed in Tony Bolden and Jayne
Cortez, “All the Birds Sing Bass: The Revolutionary Blues of Jayne Cortez,” African American
Review 35 (Spring 2001): 66–7. See also Lock, Blutopia, 262n91.
92 Regarding Drum and other female-figure album covers of the mid-1950s, see Milton Bracker,
“Bare Essentials of LP Album Covers,” New York Times, 17 March 1957, M9. John Howland has
discussed this midcentury “vinyl vixen” album cover vogue in “Jazz With Strings: Between Jazz
and the Great American Songbook,” in Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries, ed. David
Ake, Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Daniel Goldmark (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2012), 142.
93 For example, see Duke Ellington, “Sex Is No Sin,” reprinted in Nicholson, Reminiscing, 297.
Regarding connections between jazz, sex, and “the American concept of the bohemian
nonconformist,” see Ingrid Monson, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and
Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological
Society 48 (Autumn 1995): 404.
94 Regarding instances of “walking phallic symbol” imagery in jazz history, see Monson,
“Problem.” Ellington’s son Mercer appropriates the name “Madame Zajj” as “a pseudonymous
composite for several ladies in Pop’s later life” in his own Ellington biography. See Mercer
Ellington, Duke Ellington in Person (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978), 125–7.
95 As the Drum album was being completed, Ellington cited Whiteman in a discussion of the
word “jazz,” noting that “first it was ‘disgraceful’; then Paul Whiteman made a ‘lady’ of it.”
Duke Ellington, as quoted in Nat Hentoff, “The Duke,” Down Beat, 26 December 1956, 25.
Example 9.1A “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2 (Drums Rab)” (1:31ff.)
and harpist Glamann, who were each imported from outside the mascu-
line domain of the Ellington orchestra, likewise fulfill this symphonic jazz
trope through an instrument and voice type that arguably represent the
most feminine qualities of the European classical symphonic tradition.96
Tynes’s performance in Drum’s opening number serves as an immediate
announcement of feminine-classical presence within the masculine-jazz
ethos of the production.
The Drum score itself might be interpreted to reinforce a gendered dis-
course through its various contrasting orchestral textures.97 For instance,
in “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2,” saxophonist Johnny Hodges grittily
96 The West German script further specifies “strings of a harp, plucked by the hands of a
woman.” West German script, 46. Handwritten notes for an unused passage of narration also
specify a flute solo.
97 While the expansive topic of Ellington–Strayhorn gender relationships is beyond the scope of
this study, it is worth noting that Drum is also the context in which Irving Townsend provided
his infamous description of Strayhorn’s music as expressing “the feminine side of Ellington.”
Townsend, “Ellington in Private,” 80.
288 john wriggle
Example 9.1B “Ballet of the Flying Saucers,” interlude (1:58ff.)
responds to a densely voiced (with plenty of part doublings and a half-

step rub in the lower voices), blues-inflected – almost Hollywood “crime
jazz” – swing ensemble scoring conjuring a sultry Madame Zajj fatale
of the “male gaze” (Example 9.1A).98 This texture is starkly contrasted
by the rhythm-section-less rubato tempo and airy harp arpeggios backing
Hodges’s delicately ethereal interludes in “Flying Saucers” (Example 9.1B).
Hodges later cited Drum as among his favorite Ellington albums, perhaps
in appreciation of the score’s effective support of his emotive range.99
“The Rhythm Is Rhapsodic”
Debuted by Whiteman in 1924, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is

an oft-cited precedent for later “concert-style dance-band arrangements”
98 The following notated examples and charts reflect a combination of sources, including
surviving orchestra parts, score sketches, and presentation scores held in the Duke Ellington
Collection, as well as the author’s own audio transcriptions.
99 Johnny Hodges, interview by Henry Whiston, Jazz Journal International, January 1966, 9.
Table 9.2 “Ballet of the Flying Saucers,” formal outline
“Movement” Measures Tempo Meter Key
1 1–45 208 bpm 4/4 G

(Interlude) 46–9 rubato
2 50–66 104 bpm 3/4 A-flat
(Interlude) 67–70 rubato
3 71–120 288 bpm 4/4 A-flat
(open drum solo)
121–8
written by Ellington and others.100 The work’s “episodic” composi-

tional form has been both celebrated and ridiculed as an attempt to
introduce European concert music devices into the realm of Ameri-
can popular music.101 This formal strategy highlights musical varia-
tions in melodic theme, tempo, key, and meter, and was embraced by
stage show arrangers in the creation of extended production sequences
requiring controlled pacing and “spectacular” climaxes reinforcing visual
choreography.102
Drum’s “Ballet of the Flying Saucers” directly references the floor-
show entertainment tradition in its episodic production-style construc-
tion. The number also notably features symphonic instrumentation (harp
and bells), as well as a trap drum solo that recalls the aforementioned “con-
certo” specifications of the “Evolution of Rhythm” overture in Jump for
Joy.103 The three “movements” of the “Ballet” reflect shifts in meter, key,
and tempo; the fast–slow–fast sequence offers another parallel to the Euro-
pean concerto format, with Sam Woodyard’s climactic solo even serving
as a spectacular “cadenza” (see Table 9.2).
Critics’ hopes of finding an all-encompassing compositional structure
in Drum should have been assuaged by recognition of its revue format.
Yet, in addition to the reprises of “Drum Is a Woman” and “Carribee
Joe” (the juxtaposition of the two themes in the album’s “Finale” stands
100 See Howland, Uptown, 66.

101 Regarding the reception of Rhapsody in Blue, see Carol Oja, Making Music Modern: New York
in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 319. On the work’s episodic form and
its relation to subsequent interwar concert works in symphonic jazz and the big band idiom,
including works by Ellington, see Howland, Uptown.
102 See ibid., 117–18. For an example of the rhapsodic-episodic production number arranging
tradition, see the “Harlem Is Harmony” nightclub sequence closing the 1938 film The Duke Is
Tops (Million Dollar Productions; the film does not involve Ellington).
103 Eddie Lambert describes the “Flying Saucers” drum solo as “reminding us of Sonny Greer and
the Cotton Club all those many years ago.” Lambert, Duke Ellington, 193.
290 john wriggle
Example 9.2 “Finale” (0:01ff.)
as one of the most explicit motivic-based constructions of Ellington or

Strayhorn’s career; see Example 9.2), there is an array of musical motives
and gestures tying Drum’s component pieces together. These include the
trombones’ alternating fourth and tritone intervals heard in the album’s
opening number, details that are mimicked in later pieces by clarinet-led
woodwinds (Example 9.3). Similarly, orchestral settings of an off-beat
long–short rhythmic figure recur in multiple numbers (Example 9.4);
see also the penultimate measure of Example 9.1A), as do variations
of a descending blues-scale-based melodic phrase (Example 9.5). Clark
Terry’s “Madame Zajj” solo is played over a “Sweet Georgia Brown”-like
chord progression that previews the harmonic structure of “Rhumbop”;
his distinctive halve-valve technique featured in “Hey, Buddy Bolden”
reappears in the coda of “You Better Know It.”
Example 9.3 A (left): “A Drum Is a Woman Part 1” (1:45ff.) B (center): “Carribee Joe
Part 1” (2:13ff.) C (right): “Congo Square (Mme Zajj Entrance)” (3:21ff.)
Cohesion also emerges in the integration of music and storyline, as

Ellington’s own biography is recalled in Drum’s repeated “jungle” refer-
ences. Ellington’s role in American culture as a mediator of black music
for white audiences (especially in segregated venues like the Cotton Club)
often required him to frame racially based conceptions of exoticism and
“primitive” sounds. His skill in doing so not only afforded him commercial
Example 9.4A “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (2:00ff.)
Example 9.4B “Rhumbop” (0:06ff.)
Example 9.5A “Carribee Joe Part 1” (1:49ff.)
Example 9.5B “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (0:28ff.)
Example 9.5C “Ballet of the Flying Saucers” (1:40ff.)

292 john wriggle
Example 9.6 “Congo Square (Matumbe)” (1:15ff.)
success, but – perhaps ironically – also established some of the most influ-
ential aesthetic strategies of jazz still in use today. The bandleader’s famed
jungle sound of growling plunger-muted brass is traditionally reinforced
by additional “exotic” effects including rhythm section ostinato patterns,
long melodic lines emphasizing held notes, and “ominous” minor key
or “distant” whole-tone-scale tonalities. The album’s “Rhythm Pum Te
Dum” number introduces this formula early in the Drum program. And
“Matumbe,” arranged by Strayhorn and featuring a “Mooche”-like clar-
inet trio passage, efficiently distills Ellington’s iconic jungle aesthetic dur-
ing the “Congo Square” sequence (Example 9.6).
There are also notable similarities between the orchestration textures of
Drum and Ellington’s 1947 Liberian Suite. Precedents for the scoring of Ray
Nance’s held-note plunger-muted brass wails against ensemble quarter-
note punches in “Carribee Joe,” the staggered-entrance descending motive
opening “Congo Square (Silence),” and passages of contrary-motion sec-
tional scoring in “Carribee Joe,” “What Else,” and “Hey, Buddy Bolden” (a
common theatrical orchestration device, but distinctive nonetheless) can
all found in the opening to Liberian’s “Dance No. 1.”104 Perhaps similarities
in programmatic imagery suggested the borrowings: according to Elling-
ton, “Dance No. 1” depicted “the perspective of a chieftain who lives way
out in the [African] provinces . . . calling his tribe together.”105 Imagery of
“calling” permeates Drum’s narrative and musical performances, whether
Zajj calling jungle Joe, Bolden calling his “flock,” or Zajj’s arrival at “the TV
antennae of the highest skyscraper” – the latter example possibly an allu-
sion to transmission of the Drum telecast itself. The use of Liberian Suite
in a 1952 Lester Horton Dance Theater production may have also inspired
a return to these proven choreography-friendly musical gestures.106
During the “Rhumbop” sequence, Ellington explains that Madame Zajj
eyes a palm tree decoration on the nightclub wall, triggering her dream
of Carribee Joe and a flashback to the opening jungle locale for a duo
dance with Joe (“Pomegranate”) under a palm tree. The jungle palm
tree is a recurring visual image of the telecast production, providing a
thematic link between the different temporal and geographic settings of
the storyline. Possibly the suggestion of choreographer Paul Godkin, this
image is even retained in futuristic form as the Dr. Seuss-like centerpiece
of “Ballet of the Flying Saucers.”107 The New York nightclub décor of
“Rhumbop” offers additional Ellingtonian readings in recalling the famed
interior designs of the Broadway Cotton Club (the Manhattan venue
moved to Broadway and 48th in 1936), which featured a fresco depicting
“The Evolution of Swing” through scenes like “Jungle Jive” and “Congo
Conga” – the latter comprising a duo of black male and female figures
under a palm tree.108 Indeed, one Amsterdam News columnist’s suggestion
104 Ellington’s 1947 recording of the Liberian Suite is available on the CD reissue of Duke
Ellington, Ellington Uptown, Columbia CK 87066, 2004, compact disc. The opening of the
main title from Ellington’s 1959 film soundtrack for Anatomy of a Murder arguably features
similar textures as well. Duke Ellington, Anatomy of a Murder, Columbia CK 65569, 1999,
compact disc.
105 Duke Ellington, “Liberian Suite,” correspondence from Patricia Willard, Lester Horton Dance
Theater Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress.
106 “Lester Horton’s Dance Theater Choreo ’52” [program], Lester Horton Dance Theater
Collection. The Lester Horton production of Liberian Suite included not only Drum’s
“Madame Zajj” dancer Carmen de Lavallade but also production assistant Alvin Ailey, who
appears as the traffic cop character in the Drum telecast. See Willard, “Dance,” 409.
107 Regarding Godkin’s role in Drum, see Hajdu, Lush, 162. The futuristic tree may have been
constructed by artist Judith Brown, who created some of the other metal sculpture work for
the production. See “Metal Craftsman Welds Ornaments,” New York Times, 8 June 1957, 22.
108 Photos of artist Julian Harrison’s Cotton Club interiors are included in a program for the
club’s 1939 “World’s Fair” production. Other swing-era New York nightclub venues also
featured jungle or tropical imagery, including the Café Zanzibar, Hurricane Club (“Tahiti on
Broadway”), and Ubangi Club. For an account of the Ubangi Club décor, see Clyde Bernhardt
294 john wriggle
that the Drum telecast recalled “the old Cotton Club and [Café] Zanz-
ibar nights” and “should be in a major club on Broadway” is almost
redundant, given the production’s fairly explicit recreation of just such a
setting.109
“As Far Out as Far Out Goes”
In a posthumously published article dated to late 1957, Ellington cites

Drum’s “Flying Saucers” number in the company of the science-fiction
and technology tropes of Sputnik and the Egyptian pyramids. Criticiz-
ing HUAC, segregationists, and the FBI (among others), Ellington draws
parallels between the creativity of American Negroes, the slaves of the
Pharoahs, and Russian scientists building space vehicles through a musi-
cal metaphor of “the Man with the Different Sound.”110 Although his
allegorical connections are occasionally shrouded by a biting sarcasm,
Ellington’s closing statement is clearly serious: “So, this is my view of
the race for space. We’ll never get it until we Americans, collectively and
individually, get us a new sound. A new sound of harmony, brotherly
love, common respect and consideration for the dignity and freedom of
men.”111
Whether simply taking license on his recent “Flying Saucers” title or
revealing a conscious link to technology and science fiction through the
agency of what might be described as “Afrofuturism,” Drum was not
Ellington’s first foray into an allegorical future.112 The final movement of a
tone parallel Ellington envisioned in 1933 had reportedly included “a look
into the future . . . probably a hundred years from now . . . an apotheosis
aiming to put the negro in a more comfortable place among the people of
the world and a return to something he lost when he became a slave.”113
The titles of other late-1950s Ellington “space” albums or compositions
(e.g., The Cosmic Scene and “Blues in Orbit”), in the absence of explicit
with Sheldon Harris, I Remember: Eighty Years of Black Entertainment, Big Bands, and the
Blues (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 162–3.
109 Burley, “Back Door.” Ellington had also performed at the Café Zanzibar on multiple occasions.
110 Duke Ellington, “The Race for Space,” in Tucker, Reader, 293–6.
111 Ellington, “Race for Space,” 296.
112 For a discussion of Afrofuturism in relation to historical tropes (including the Egyptian
pyramids and the Cold War space race), see George E. Lewis, “After Afrofuturism,” foreword
to the Journal of the Society for American Music 2 (May 2008): 139–53.
113 Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington (New York: Creative Age Press, 1946), 155.
programmatic narratives, arguably reflect their context in space-race-

America more narrowly than Drum’s (then) fictive moon travel and flying
saucers.
Allusions to technology also emerge in “Rhumbop” via “hip preci-
sion tropical nuclear jive-time fission,” though perhaps the context here
is more “modern” than futurist. The syncopated consonant syllables of
the lyrics to “Rhumbop” reinforce the piece’s angular, chromatic bebop
melody, and recall the bebop vocalese tradition in their improvisation-
like intricacy. Candido Camero’s hand drums likewise offer a nod to Dizzy
Gillespie’s Afro-Cuban bebop aesthetic, as well as maintaining Drum’s the-
matic ties to “the beat of the original tom-tom.”114 Discographers have
noted musical relationships between “Rhumbop” and the Liberian Suite’s
“Dance No. 2,” both of which feature Jimmy Hamilton’s adroit clarinet
and a harmonic progression similar to “Sweet Georgia Brown.”115 Guthrie
Ramsey has examined bebop’s aesthetic of “virtuoso solo improvisations”
and “elaborate harmonic and melodic revisions of Tin Pan Alley songs,”
and perceived parallels with “modernist” conceptions including urban
industrialization.116 Perhaps Ellington invokes similar associations in his
assignment of “Dance No. 2” to represent “the chieftain and his people
at the [1947 Liberian Centennial] Exposition. They witness the modern
machinery, and wonder at the marvels of modern technology.”117
“Rhumbop’s” climactic pre-reprise-finale position within Drum’s pro-
gram is musically convincing, if chronologically ambivalent. A possi-
ble argument against the storyline “backtrack” scenario offered earlier is
that, absent the visual choreography of “Flying Saucer,” the audio-centric
“Rhumbop” simply offers greater potential as the revue-slot “spectacular”
114 A discussion of Afro-Cuban music, bebop, and concepts of modernism is offered in David
Garcı́a, “‘We Both Speak African’: A Dialogic Study of Afro-Cuban Jazz,” Journal of the Society
for American Music 5 (May 2011): 215–19.
115 “Rhumbop” is described as “a derivative of [Liberian Suite] ‘Dance #2/Trebop’” in Timner,
Ellingtonia, 171. The musical connection is valid but loose: while both pieces appear to have
been co-composed by Ellington and Hamilton, and while both feature a similar harmonic
structure and tempo, only brief fragments of the melodic material from “Trebop” – mostly
within Hamilton’s own solo phrasing – are reminiscent of “Rhumbop,” and none of it is
identical for the duration of a complete phrase. Another Drum “derivation” includes the use
of a phrase from “(A Tune in) A-flat Minor,” recorded by Ellington in August 1956; possibly a
Clark Terry contribution, this half-valve trumpet phrase reappears in “Hey, Buddy Bolden”
(as well as a later piece titled “Bluer”).
116 Guthrie P. Ramsey, Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), 107. Regarding bebop as an invocation of modernism, see ibid.,
96–108.
117 Ellington, “Liberian Suite.”
296 john wriggle
in the album sequence. Such an assignment might be read to reinforce

Ellington’s emerging suite-form aesthetic, emphasizing pacing over pro-
gram. In ensuing projects like Such Sweet Thunder, programmatic titles
could be swapped or reconceived in order to compliment the overall
musical structure of an album or suite. The intrinsic malleability of the
segmented revue format offered Ellington practical and effective solutions
for presenting extended forms, and may have also better accommodated
his hectic recording and travel schedules. Ellington would increasingly
take advantage of the suite-suggestive characteristics inherent in the LP
format, allowing an album sequence to suggest its own implicit relation-
ships across its varied content.118
Conclusion: “Now Let Me Tell You a Story”
Leonard Bernstein’s 1956 album What Is Jazz? (which opens with Elling-
ton’s theme song, “Take the ‘A’ Train”) proposes “to investigate jazz, not
through the usual historical approach of ‘up the river from New Orleans,’
etcetera . . . [but] to find out, once and for all, what it is that sets it apart
from all other music.”119 A series of performance demonstrations in his-
torical sequence follows – proceeding from Africa to New Orleans, and
essentially “up the river” to Tin Pan Alley – including discussion of blue
notes, syncopation, and manipulations of tone color. Ellington’s Drum
also tells us about the “innards” of jazz, but through the eyes, ears, and
imagination of one (or more) of its primary participants. In telling his own
story his own way, with all its theatrical pomposity, sexist imagery, and jive
poetry, Ellington’s version of jazz history provides what is arguably absent
in What Is Jazz?: a convincing passion and enthusiasm for the power and
history of the music.
Some of the negative reactions to Drum’s musical or narrative efforts are
valid. While the album and telecast scripts are often clever in their musical
and sexual entendre, audiences may find their brand of wit demanding of
either knowledge or patience. Ellington was at a formative young age when
he first observed that “when you were playing piano, there was always a
118 Another popular example is The Far East Suite, where the effective finale of the album (“Ad
Lib on Nippon”) was not originally envisioned as part of the “suite” per se. Duke Ellington,
The Far East Suite, BMG Bluebird 7640–2, 1988, compact disc. See also Stefano Zenni, “The
Aesthetics of Duke Ellington’s Suites: The Case of ‘Togo Brava,’” Black Music Research Journal
21 (Spring 2001): 12–23.
119 Leonard Bernstein, What Is Jazz, Omnibus Series, Columbia CL 919, 1956, LP.
pretty girl standing down at the bass clef end.”120 His apparent need to
remind us of this lesson for the duration of his life highlights longstanding
and deeply rooted notions of sex and roles of gender in jazz: troubling
characteristics of the music’s history that champions of “America’s classi-
cal music” still struggle with today. Yet the fact that Drum so shamelessly
frames themes of “jungle” primitivism, cultural ownership, commercial-
ization, and urban modernity in a hallucinatory melange of music and
eroticism may also be the work’s most profound statement. As an expan-
sive presentation of historical and biographical themes that Ellington felt
were important to him – and, by extension, to African American art, and
American culture at large – Drum remains an astounding artifact to be
reckoned with.
With the national telecast of Drum, Ellington appears to finally reassure
himself of – indeed, proclaim – his role as an “elder statesman” of jazz,
subject to different rules of reception and criticism than other figures of
lesser pedigree. Not surprisingly, some of his critics seem to have been a
bit slower in picking up on this emerging role – or perhaps they consid-
ered themselves to have already accepted the phenomenon, before even
Ellington himself did. By 1956, the bandleader’s journey from the Cotton
Club “jungle” to the “company of kings” was the stuff of legend. But Drum
demonstrates that Ellington had also developed the artistic voice and com-
mercial power necessary to craft his own image as he saw fit, no longer
relying on critics and historians to write his epithet for him. His following
romantic, political, and spiritual projects, ranging from The Queen’s Suite
to My People to The River, could be undertaken with reasonable assurance
that the resulting product – whether success or failure – would command
respect on a level beyond financial earnings or initial critical reception.121
And even though Drum was not a blockbuster hit with jazz critics and
audiences, Ellington and Strayhorn saw enough potential in the project’s
LP-length revue/suite format to regularly return to the “concept album”
strategy through the remainder of their careers.
In Duke Ellington’s America, Harvey Cohen rightly lauds the Drum
production as providing “a historical and cultural link between African,
120 Ellington, Mistress, 21–2.

121 Ellington’s withholding of the 1959 The Queen’s Suite recording from public distribution
during his lifetime could certainly be read to indicate the maestro’s new-found comfort with
his sense of historical place; see Stanley Dance, liner notes to The Ellington Suites, Pablo OJCD
446–2, 1990, compact disc. The political context of My People is examined in Cohen, America,
378–407. A discussion of The River and other Ellington works used for ballet is included in
Franceschina, Duke, 161–9.
298 john wriggle
African American, and Latin American peoples,” and representing a “pio-

neering” approach to the new technology of television, much as Ellington
had done in the recording and radio media.122 Yet Cohen still concludes
that “aside from [generating hundreds of articles], the career impact on
Ellington from the [Drum TV] special was limited.”123 The tendency to
overlook or minimize Drum’s personal and public significance for Elling-
ton during 1956–7 reflects a broad legacy of wishful thinking shared by
numerous (mostly jazz) critics who apparently felt as Cohen: that “the
music on [the album] A Drum Is a Woman, not Ellington and Stray-
horn’s best by a long shot, was too explicitly tied to the visuals to artis-
tically succeed.”124 It is a revealing reflection of jazz historiography that
so many commentators have either dismissed or failed to acknowledge
the work – with or without “the visuals” – as a revue out of the Harlem
stage entertainment tradition. To preclude Drum from Ellington’s major
accomplishments for being theater music is to ignore a central component
of Ellington’s career, and American art. A Drum Is a Woman stands as a
lushly ambitious demonstration of a performance medium that Ellington
himself helped to mold, and which served as the vehicle for many of his
most influential creations.
122 Cohen, America, 330. 123 Ibid., 333. 124 Ibid., emphasis added.
Index
3 Gymnopédies (Satie), 153 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 40, 45, 46, 56, 58, 67,
42nd Street (film), 16, 17 68, 69, 72, 109, 166, 195, 255
100 Men and a Girl (film), 43 Back to Back, 220
Ad Lib on Nippon, 148, 149, 150, 152, 253, 296 Bailey, Bill, 79
Adams, Diana, 182, 183 Bailey, Ozzie, 284
Addis Ababa, 257, 258, 259, 261 Bailey, Pearl, 89
Adorno, Theodor, 33, 46, 47, 195 Baker, Harold, 280
Afrique, 242, 254, 255 Balanchine, George, 182, 183
Afro-Bossa, 238, 241, 249 Baldwin, James, 196
Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, The, 254, 255 Ballad for Americans, 29
After Bird Jungle, 238, 249 Ballet méchanique (film), 24
Agate, James, 231 Ballet of the Flying Saucers, 215, 271, 273, 279,
Agon (Stravinsky), 182, 183, 189 288, 289, 291, 293, 294, 295
Ailey, Alvin, 245, 293 Band Call, 141
Air Conditioned Jungle, 231 Band Wagon, The (film), 15
Ajemian, Anahid, 185 Baraka, Amiri, 75
Albright, Daniel, 24 Barnet, Charlie, 164
Alexander, Karen, 15 Baron, Art, 258, 259, 260, 262
All My Loving (Beatles), 218, 219 Basie, Count, 94, 96, 117, 178, 220
Altman, Rick, 27 Beach Boys, 216
Amad, 149 Beatles, 216, 218, 219
American in Paris (Gershwin), 62, 274 Beatty, Talley, 274
American Lullaby, 73 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 47, 67, 68, 69, 140,
Amour, Amour, 256 189, 255
Anatomy of a Murder (film), 138, 173, 293 Beiderbecke, Bix, 32
Anderson, Cat, 98, 187, 188, 247, 281 Belafonte, Harry, 283, 284
Anderson, Ivie, 79 Bell, Aaron, 145, 220
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 188 Bellerby, Vic, 94, 103, 104
Appalachian Spring (Copeland), 195 Bellson, Louie, 212, 213, 271
Applebaum, Louis, 185 Benamou, Catherine, 278
Arlen, Harold, 73 Benjamin, Joe, 260, 261
Armstrong, Louis, 1, 25, 29, 30, 32, 50, 76, 80, Benjamin, Walter, 34
116, 117, 145, 163, 164, 220, 278, 279, Berio, Luciano, 166
280, 281, 282 Berkeley, Busby, 25, 27, 28, 29
Ashcroft, Peggy, 186 Berlin, Irving, 50
Astaire, Fred, 15, 22, 40 Bernstein, Leonard, 48, 179, 182, 184, 189,
Astatke, Mulatu, 259, 260, 261 296
Atkins, Ronald, 103, 105 Berry, Chuck, 221
Avakian, George, 32, 38, 211, 212, 217, 218 Bigard, Barney, 117, 168, 169
Azure, 253 Birdie Jungle, 238, 249
Bizet, Georges, 189
B Sharp Blues, 137 Black and Tan (film), 1, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28,
Baby, When You Ain’t There, 85 38, 62, 86, 204
299
300 Index
Black and Tan Fantasy (composition), 18, 19, Carolina Shout, 111
20, 23, 98, 116, 201, 202, 210, 228, 229, Carribee Joe, 270, 289, 290, 291, 292
235, 248 Carter, Benny, 88
Black Beauty, 19, 21, 51, 58, 85, 111, 112, 113, Carter, Elliott, 45
114, 120, 123 Cashmere Cutie, 162
Black, Brown and Beige, xix, xx, 9, 11, 12, 36, Celly, Al, 90
37, 48, 61, 62, 67, 73, 125, 126, 179, 180, Cera, Stephen, 71
181, 189, 196, 197, 202, 210, 230, 232, Chandler, Raymond, 199
234, 235, 240, 241, 242, 273, 277, 284 Change Is Gonna Come, A (Cooke), 6
Blakey, Art, 249 Chant of the Weed, 136
Blanton, Jimmy, 119, 120, 121, 122, 136 Chappelle, Dave, 30
Blitzstein, Marc, 182, 185 Charles, Ray, 216
Blondell, Joan, 28 Charleston (Johnson), 121
Blood of Jesus (film), 25 Chevalier, Maurice, 64, 204
Blowin’ in the Wind (Dylan), 218 Chevan, David, 163
Blue Belles of Harlem, 116, 125, 126, 129, 135 Chopin, Fréderic, 19, 23, 161, 166
Blue Ramble, 85 Circle of Fourths, 188
Blue Serge, 123 City of Glass, 215
Blues in Orbit, 143, 294 Clansman, The (Dixon), 4
Boas, Franz, 233 Clarke, Kenny, 249
Bogle, Donald, 14 Clementine, 123
Bogues, Anthony, 3 Clothed Woman, The, 133, 134, 135, 136, 146,
Bolden, Buddy, 215, 280 150
Bop Girl Goes Calypso (film), 283 Cocktails for Two, 214
Boyer, Richard O., 234 Cohen, Harvey, 70, 71, 73, 186, 195, 233, 297,
Brahms, Johannes, 46, 68, 166 298
Brando, Marlon, 184 Cold War, xix, 178, 183, 206
Britten, Benjamin, 100 Cole, Nat King, 178
Broadway Melody of 1940 (film), 22 Coles, Johnny, 260
Brown, Earle, 166 Collier, James Lincoln, 178, 197
Brown, Lawrence, 26, 131, 145, 149, 169, 171 Coltrane, John, 124, 145, 220
Brown, Louis, 110 Come Easter, 101
Browne, Roscoe Lee, 184 Come Sunday, 104, 181
Brubeck, Dave, 185 Concord Sonata (Ives), 195
Bruckner, Anton, 51, 166, 202 Confrey, Zez, 52
Bundle of Blues (film), 1, 23 Cong-go, 235, 238, 249
Burns, Ken, 198 Congo Square, 215, 270, 271, 285, 290, 291,
292
C Jam Blues, 123 Connor, Edgar, 21
Cabin in the Sky (film), 1, 23, 25 Controversial Suite, 213
Cage, John, 166 Cook, Mercer, 245, 252
Calloway, Cab, 76 Cook, Nicholas, 158, 171
Calypso, 283 Cook, Will Marion, 111, 226, 252
Camero, Candido, 270, 271, 295 Cooke, Sam, 6
Cameron, Basil, 56, 58 Cooper, George “Buster,” 245
Caravan, 90, 98, 130, 210, 263 Copland, Aaron, 51, 54, 179, 195
Carmen (Bizet), 189 Corelli, Arcangelo, 166
Carmen Jones (film), 15, 189 Cosmic Scene, The, 294
Carnegie Hall, 32, 36, 38, 48, 62, 68, 69, 73, 94, Cotton Club, 22, 23, 50, 55, 57, 64, 77, 116,
98, 108, 125, 126, 129, 130, 131, 133, 136, 204, 224, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 242,
179, 180, 181, 210, 235, 273 248, 250, 255, 263, 282, 290, 293, 294,
Carney, Harry, 92, 96, 134, 145, 147, 187 297
Index 301
Cotton Club Stomp, The, 22 Du Bois, W. E. B., 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 180, 192, 226,
Cotton Club, The (film), 1 233, 234
Cottontail, 120 Duberman, Martin, 180
Countee Cullen, 67 Dubin, Al, 28
Creole Love Call, 85, 98, 203, 248 Dudley, Bessie, 79
Creole Rhapsody, 38, 53, 55, 56, 59, 60, 62, 63, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, 220
64, 93, 116, 117, 202, 210, 215 Duke Ellington Panorama, A, 36
Crombie, Tony, 90 Duke Ellington Songbook, The, 186
Cultural Front. See Popular Front Duke Ellington, The Pianist, 147
Duke Plays Ellington, The, 139
Dafora, Asadata, 239 Duke Steps Out, The, 21
Dakar, 237, 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, Duke, Vernon, 73
250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256 Duval, Lawrence, 83
Damrosch, Walter, 47, 69 Dvořák, Antonı́n, 97
Dance No. 1 (Liberian Suite), 293 Dyer, Richard, 13
Dance No. 2 (Liberian Suite), 295 Dylan, Bob, 218
Dance, Stanley, 95, 96, 99, 211, 212
Dancers In Love, 129, 130, 162, 248 East St. Louis Toodle-O, 116, 202, 214, 228,
Dandridge, Dorothy, 189 235
Dankworth, John, 98 Ebony Rhapsody, 48, 62, 74
Darrell, R.D., 18, 19, 20, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 59, Echoes of the Jungle, 231
61, 62, 64, 68, 69 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 190
Davis, Kay, 89, 131 El Gato, 98
Davis, Miles, 1, 120, 136, 280 El Viti, 246, 248
Davison, Harold, 92 Elgar, Edward, 51, 97
Dawn, Marpesa, 246 Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Duke Ellington
Day Dream, 147, 162 Songbook, 93
Daybreak Express, 205 Ellington ’65, 218
Dean, James, 184 Ellington ’66, 218, 219, 220
Debussy, Claude, xvii, 51, 60, 68, 137, 138, Ellington at Newport, 93, 142, 198, 217, 218,
255 265, 266, 276
Deep Forest, 254 Ellington Uptown, i, 20, 211, 215
Deep South Suite, xix, 108, 131, 132, 133, 137, Ellington, Duke
139, 179, 187, 189 Africa, xviii, 12, 23, 67, 224–64, 269, 272,
Delius, Frederick, xvii, 51, 54, 56, 58, 60 273, 278, 279, 280, 296, 297
Denby, Edwin, 182, 183 African American music traditions, 67, 68,
Denning, Michael, 28, 29, 182 225, 226, 234, 269
Depk, 148, 253 civil rights, xx, 179, 180, 181, 205, 206, 282
DeVeaux, Scott, 162, 165, 166, 167, 170 composer, xix, 57–70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 93,
Dèwèl (Astatke), 259, 260 157–76, 267, 269
Dewhurst, Colleen, 184 composition, 38, 49, 51, 53, 54
Dexter, Dave Jr., 35 critical reception, xv–xvi, 49, 76
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, 62, 96, 116, entertainment, xvi, 78, 93
117, 142, 218 extended form, xviii, xx, 36, 38, 60, 61, 62,
Dinerstein, Joel, 200, 205 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 93, 103,
Dishman, Les, 110 116, 125, 126, 137, 170, 173, 179, 189,
Dixon, Thomas, 4 196, 202, 203, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213,
Dodge, Roger Pryor, 49, 50, 52, 61, 62, 64, 66 215, 267, 268, 276, 296
Domino, Fats, 188 film, 1–31
Dowland, John, 188 jungle style, 20, 55, 57, 60, 86, 191, 197, 224,
Drum Is a Woman, A, xx, 93, 181, 186, 215, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 235, 236,
235, 265–98 239, 242, 248, 254, 255, 292
302 Index
Ellington, Duke (cont.) Garbo, Greta, 2

LP (long-playing recording) as a medium, Garland, Red, 119
Ellington and, xix, 197–223, 239, 266, Garrison, Jimmy, 220
268, 286, 296, 297 Garvey, Marcus, 283
pianist, xviii, 108–56 Genius Hits the Road, The (album) (Charles),
public persona, xvi, xvii, 1, 2, 27, 31, 33, 36, 217
38, 47, 51, 53, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 74 Gershwin, George, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 55, 59, 60,
publicity, xvii, 38, 57, 77, 204, 265, 276 62, 64, 69, 70, 73, 120, 228, 288
race, xvii, xx, 1, 2, 13, 23, 27, 30, 88, 190, Ghana, 225, 235, 236, 243
199, 204, 205 Giddins, Gary, 162, 165, 166, 167, 170, 198,
tone parallels, 67, 179, 186, 215, 267 212
United Kingdom, xvii–xviii, 76–107 Gillespie, Dizzy, 112, 120, 295
Ellington, Mercer, 63, 123, 164, 167, 168, 186, Gillman, Susan, 4, 11
252, 286 Girl from Ipanema, The (Jobim), 256
Ellington, Ruth, 186, 234 Glamann, Betty, 273, 287
Ellingtonia (album), 34, 35, 38, 74, 165 Glassberg, David, 8
Ellison, Ralph, 30, 196 Gleason, Ralph, 108, 212
Emperor Jones, The (film), 24 Glenn, Tyree, 235
Epic of the Sudan (Es-Sadi), 233 Godkin, Paul, 293
Ethiopia, 3, 224, 225, 226, 232, 233, 243, 257, Goffin, Robert, 66
258, 259, 260, 261, 262 Gold Diggers of 1933 (film), 27
Evans, Bill, 141 Gonsalves, Paul, 95, 96, 118, 143, 145, 155, 187,
Evans, Gil, 119, 136, 137 188, 193, 198, 218, 270, 271
Evolution of Rhythm, 289 Gottlieb, George, 16
Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song and Gould, Glenn, 30
Story, The, 226, 232 Gould, Morton, 48
Goutelas Suite, 253
Fallon, Jack, 90 Graetinger, Bob, 215
Far East Suite, 145, 148, 152, 197, 219, 223, Grainger, Percy, 56, 58, 59, 67, 69
253, 296 Grant, Henry, 110
Farrakhan, Louis, 3 Granz, Norman, 93, 94
Farrington, Holly, 199 Greatest There Is (He’s a Whiz), The,
Feather, Leonard, 93, 252, 267, 269, 278, 279, 281
280 Greaves, William, 246, 247, 255, 256
Feldman, Morton, 166 Green, Edward, xv
Felix, Brian, 218 Greenberg, Clement, 34, 44, 46
Ferneyhough, Brian, 166 Greenlee, George, 193
Fiedler, Arthur, 212 Greer, Sonny, 111, 228, 230, 232, 235, 238, 277,
Fielding, Harold, 91 289
Fifty-Second Street Theme (Monk), Grieg, Edvard, 54
140 Grofé, Ferde, 46, 47, 59, 73
First World Festival of Negro Arts, The (film), Guthrie, Ramsey, 295
245, 246 Guthrie, Tyrone, 183
Fitzgerald, Ella, 93, 103, 104, 186, 243 Guthrie, Woody, 179
Flaming Youth, 22
Flamingo, 214, 274 Hagen, Uta, 186
Fleurette Africaine, La, 238, 239, 249, 263 Haig, Al, 112
Footlight Parade (film), 29 Hajdu, David, 185, 193, 273, 275, 276, 284
Franceschina, John, 275 Half the Fun, 188, 189
Francis, Harry, 92 Hall, Barrie Lee, Jr., 258, 259, 260, 262
Hall, Henry, 82
Gabbard, Krin, 1, 21, 23, 25 Hall Johnson Choir, 23
Gammond, Peter, 267, 272 Hallelujah! (film), 24
Index 303
Hamilton, Jimmy, 98, 131, 149, 151, 152, 187, I Don’t Mind, 123
193, 231, 295 I Got Rhythm (Gershwin), 120, 139
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 187, 188 I Like the Sunrise, 235
Hammerstein, Oscar II, 182, 189 I Never Felt This Way Before, 120, 167–70, 173
Hammond, John, 65 I Want to Hold Your Hand (Beatles), 218
Hampton, Justin, 9 In a Mellotone, 119
Happy-Go-Lucky Local, 108, 132, 133, 136 In the Beginning God, 101
Hardin, Lil, 163, 278 In Triplicate, 262
Hardwick, Otto, 171 Isfahan, 162, 219, 253
Hasse, John, 225 Iverson, Ethan, 71, 72, 74
Haupé, 138 Ives, Charles, 195
Hawkins, Coleman, 89, 96, 145, 220
Hayden, Melissa, 183 Jack the Bear, 119, 120, 136, 214
Heath, Edward, 101 Jackson, Mahalia, 181
Heath, Ted, 92 Jackson, Quentin “Butter,” 187, 284
Heifetz, Jascha, 30 Jamal, Ahmad, 119, 120
Heindorf, Ray, 28 Jameson, Frederic, 5, 7
Hellman, Lillian, 179 Jamison, Judith, 245
Henderson, Fletcher, 251 Janet, 137
Henderson, Luther, 164 Jazz Messengers, 249
Hendrix, Jimi, 219 Jeep’s Blues, 98
Henry, Pierre, 221 Jeffries, Herb, 168, 170, 274, 283
Hentoff, Nat, 240, 251, 271, 279 Jenkins, Freddie, 165
Hepburn, Audrey, 2 Jenkins, Henry, 15, 16, 18
Herman, Woody, 178 Jewell, Derek, 105
Hey, Buddy Bolden, 270, 274, 280, 281, 290, Jobim, Antonio Carlos, 256
292, 295 Johnson, James P., 22, 50, 52, 111, 112, 114,
Hi Fi Fo Fum, 98 121, 140, 279
Hibbler, Al, 235 Johnson, Lyndon, 146
Hi-Fi Ellington Uptown, xx, 211 Jones, Elvin, 220
Hindemith, Paul, 54, 179 Jones, Hank, 112
Historically Speaking: The Duke, 214 Jones, Herbie, 165
Hodeir, André, 197 Jones, James Earl, 184
Hodges, Johnny, 92, 95, 98, 122, 145, 155, 171, Jones, Max, 91, 92, 99, 100, 101, 105
187, 188, 193, 219, 220, 249, 271, 287, 288 Jones, Rufus, 149, 255
Hoefsmit, Sjef, 241 Jones, Wallace, 168
Homzy, Andrew, 165 Jordan, Louis, 283
Honeymoon Hotel, 29 Jump for Joy (musical), 24, 173, 179, 277, 278,
Hopkins, Claude, 110 289
Horowitz, Joseph, 33, 44, 45 Jungle Blues, 231
Hot and Bothered, 53, 55, 203 Jungle Jamboree, 231
House Un-American Activities Committee Jungle Kitty, 238, 249
(HUAC), 180, 184, 294 Jungle Nights in Harlem, 51, 231
How High the Moon, 188 Jungle Triangle, 238, 249
Howland, John, 12, 16, 20, 206, 212, 226, 272, Juniflip, 98
286 Just A-Settin’ and A-Rockin’, 123
Hughes, Langston, 179, 246, 256
Hughes, Spike, 65, 77, 78, 79, 85, 86, 91 Katz, Mark, 206
Hylton, Jack, 79, 81, 82, 83, 87, 88, 91 Keightley, Keir, 208, 210, 212
Hymn of Sorrow, 13, 24 Kelly, Gene, 22, 274
Kenton, Stan, 92, 178, 215
I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, 214 Kentucky Club, 63
I Don’t Know What Kind of Blues I Got, 123 Kinda Dukish, 139, 140, 153
304 Index
King, Martin Luther, 6, 181 Marche funèbre (Chopin), 19, 23

King Fit the Battle of Alabam, 181 Marshall, Wendell, 213
Kitt, Eartha, 188 Martin, David Stone, 38
Ko-Ko, 120, 136, 214 Masterpieces by Ellington, 209, 211
Kostelanetz, Andre, 46, 47, 74, 212 Matumbe, 270, 271, 291, 292
Kott, Jan, 184 McCarthy, Joseph, xix, 178
Kuebler, Annie, 174 McDaniel, Hattie, 15
McFadden, William, 71
La Nevada, 136 Mecuria, the Lion, 258, 259
Lady Mac, 143, 187 Meditation, 152, 153
Lamb, John, 149, 176, 247, 249 Melancholia, 137, 138, 139
Lambert, Constant, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, Menand, Louis, 44, 45
61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 69, 78, 79, 83, 281, Mendelssohn, Felix, 166, 192, 193
289 Menelik – the Lion of Judah (Stewart), 261
Lang, Eddie, 52 Metropolis (film), 199
Lang, Fritz, 199 Metzer, David, 20
Lange, Dorthea, 29 middlebrow, xvi, xvii, 32–49, 52, 55–75, 208,
Las Vegas Tango, 136 212, 214, 274
Lascelles, Gerald, 97, 101 Middleton, Richard, 159
Lately, 188 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 177,
Lawrence, Carol, 183 178, 186, 187, 192
Lazy Rhapsody, 85 Miles Ahead (album), 120
Leavitt, Michael, 8 Miley, James, 19, 227, 228, 229
Léger, Fernand, 24 Milhaud, Darious, 54
Leur, Walter van de, xviii, xix, 138, 273 Miller, Max, 79
Levine, Lawrence, 44, 183 Miller, Mitch, 202, 210
Liberian Suite, The, 213, 235, 238, 292, 293, Mills, Irving, 1, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 71,
295 77, 78, 86, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 231
Lincoln, Abraham, 7 Minerve, Harold, 260, 262
Liszt, Franz, 55, 62, 63, 73 Mingus, Charles, 145, 220, 238
Little Rootie Tootie, 133 Minnelli, Vincente, 25, 26
Liza, 214 Mitchell, Arthur, 182, 183
Lock, Graham, 196, 269 Mitchell, Malcolm, 90
Logan, Arthur, 175 Mitropoulos, Dmitri, 185
Lorin, Will, 268 Modern American Music (Willson), 73
Lots o’ Fingers, 116, 202 Modern Jazz Quartet, 185
Louis, Joe, 191 Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music
Lovejoy, Alec, 21 (Charles), 216
Lowenthal, Leo, 33 Money Jungle, 220, 238, 249
LP (long-playing recording) as a medium, 172, Monk, Thelonious, 114, 120, 121, 122, 126,
205–8, 216, 222, 279, 286 133, 140, 156
Lunceford, Jimmie, 164 Mooche, The, 85, 98, 213, 229, 236, 237, 248,
Lynes, Russell, 34, 39, 42, 212 263, 292
Lyttelton, Humphrey, 94, 97, 98 Mood Indigo, 51, 55, 59, 68, 80, 81, 85, 102,
115, 127, 154, 203, 205, 210
M’bow, Gana, 249, 250 Morgan, Lee, 219
Macbeth (Shakespeare), 183, 185, 187 Morning Air, 113, 135
Macdonald, Dwight, 34, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 46, Morrow, Edward R., 186
47, 63 Morton, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll,” 48, 112, 164
Madness in Great Ones, 187, 188 Morton, John Fass, 217
Mahler, Gustav, 51, 202 Mos Def, 30
Mailer, Norman, 27 Mount Harissa, 148
Malcolm X, 196 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 45, 52, 60, 158
Index 305
Mr. J. B. Blues, 120, 121, 122, 123 Phillips, Woolf, 89

Muddy Waters, 98, 221 Piano Reflections, 137, 141
Murder at the Vanities (film), 48, 62 Pierrot Lunaire (Schönberg), 160
Murphy, Dudley, 23 Pink Floyd, 217
Muscle Shoals Blues, 114 Plus Belle Africaine, La, xviii, 101, 224, 238,
Music Is My Mistress (book), 64, 98, 105, 174, 241–2, 248, 249, 251, 262
187, 199, 201, 203, 224, 226, 249 Pollack, Jackson, 45
My Funny Valentine, 98 Pomegranate, 271, 274, 293
My Old Flame, 214 Popular Front, 13, 27, 179
My People, xx, 181, 297 Porgy and Bess (Gershwin), 196
Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, 93
Nabokov, Nicholas, 179 Portrait of The Lion, 146
Nance, Ray, 89, 91, 122, 123, 145, 187, 191, Powell, Bud, 112
192, 193, 273, 279, 281, 283, 292 Powell, Eleanor, 22
Nanton, Joe “Tricky Sam,” 19, 87, 123, 166, Premiered by Ellington, 214
169, 171, 227, 228 Pretty and the Wolf, 99
Naremore, James, 25 Pretty Girl, 187
Negro Nuances, 226, 232 Procope, Russell, 187, 193, 214, 273
Nelson, Stanley, 76, 78, 81, 82, 107 Prouty, Kenneth, 75
New Conversations, 141 Prudente, Vince, 257, 262
New Orleans (film), 280
New Orleans Suite, 253 Queen Elizabeth II, 97, 98, 143
New Rhumba, 120 Queen’s Suite, 97, 143, 144, 297
New World A-Comin’, xix, 126, 128, 129, 152, Queenie Pie, 174
179
New York Philharmonic, 59, 185 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 97
Nicholas brothers, 89 Raglin, Junior, 136
Nichols, Red, 35 Ramsey, Frederick Jr., 66
Night Creature, 142 Randolph, A. Phillip, 180
Nobody Was Looking, 108, 131, 132, 139, 187 Ransom, Reverdy C., 6, 7, 11
Rape of a Rhapsody, 62, 73
Obama, Barack, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 15, 27, 30, 31 Ravel, Maurice, 51, 53, 54, 68, 137, 138
Odets, Clifford, 179, 184 Real Jazz, The (book), 61, 66
Old Man Blues, 85 Reed, Barbara, 185
Old Man River (Kern), 12 Reflections in D, 137, 138, 139, 141
Olivier, Lawrence, 188 Reich, Howard, 72
Opener, The, 247 Reigger, Wallingford, 56
Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 80 Reiner, Fritz, 69, 186
Osgood, Henry, 50 Reinhardt, Max, 192
Othello (Shakespeare), 178, 186, 187, 188, 189, Remember My Forgotten Man, 28, 29
190–2, 196 Reminiscing in Tempo, 62, 65, 170–1, 173, 202,
Overture to a Jam Session, 162 210
Retrospection, 137, 138, 139
Page, Patti, 178 Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin), 55, 288
Panassié, Hughes, 65, 66 Rhapsody Jr., 62
Papp, Joseph, 183, 184, 188 Rhapsody of Negro Life (film), 1, 11
Parker, Charlie, 112, 239 Rhodes, Cecil, 3
Perdido, 98, 123, 213 Rhumbop, 215, 271, 279, 290, 291, 293, 295
Perfume Suite, 129, 130, 162 Rhythm Pum Te Dum, 235, 270, 282, 292
Perry, Doc, 110 Rhyth-Mania (drama), 229
Pet Sounds (Beach Boys), 216 Right On Togo, 242, 256
Peter, Paul, and Mary, 218 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 51, 68
Pettiford, Oscar, 133, 136 River, The, 297
306 Index
Roach, Max, 145, 220, 238, 239, 240, 263 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles),
Robbins, Jack, 90 216
Robbins, Jerome, 183 Shakespeare, William, xix, 45, 99, 177, 178,
Robeson, Paul, 12, 13, 29, 179, 180, 186 181, 183, 184, 185, 188, 189, 190, 196,
Robinson, Jackie, 180 215, 216
Robinson, Sugar Ray, 191 Shapiro, Nat, 279
Rock City Rock, 236 Shaw, Artie, 66
Rockin’ in Rhythm, 85, 139, 140 Shepherd, The, 147, 148
Rodgers, Richard, 182 Sherman Shuffle, 123
Rodzinski, Artur, 69 Shively, W. Phillips, 5
Rogers, Ginger, 40 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 179
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 183, 187 Show Boat (film), 12, 15
Rooney, Mickey, 192 Show Girl (musical), 62
Ross, Alex, 47, 48, 62, 63 Sibelius, Jean, 51, 68
Rubin, Joan Shelley, 33, 44, 45 Side by Side, 220
Rubinstein, Anton, 30 Sidewinder (Morgan), 219
Run Joe, 283 Silver, Horace, 148, 149
Rushing, Jimmy, 98 Sinatra, Frank, 217
Singin’ in the Rain (film), 274
Sacre du printemps, Le (Stravinsky), 22, 51 Singin’ in the Rain (song), 22
Sacred Concerts, xviii, xx, 76, 91, 100–5, 106, Single Petal of a Rose, The, 143, 144, 259
181, 197 Skin Deep, 212, 213
A Concert of Sacred Music, 100, 102, 152, 276 Smada, 162
Second Sacred Concert, 253 Smith, Bessie, 50
Third Sacred Concert, 101, 154, 257 Smith, Charles Edward, 66
Sanders, John, 165, 170, 175, 187, 193 Smith, Clara, 50
Sargeant, Winthrop, 69 Smith, Pine Top, 35
Satie, Erik, 153 Smith, Willie “The Lion,” 111, 113, 114, 133,
Satin Doll, 247 146, 279
Schaap, Phil, 217, 218 Sneakaway, 113
Schaeffer, Pierre, 221 Snowden, Elmer, 228, 229
Schiff, David, 215 Soda Fountain Rag, 110
Schoenberg, Arnold, 160, 179, 182 Solitude, 68, 90, 124, 126, 210, 242
Scholl, Warren, 52, 57 Sondheim, Stephen, 182
Schrecker, Ellen, 180 Song of the Cotton Field, 228
Schubert, Franz, 52, 60 Sonnet for Caesar, 187
Schuller, Gunther, 72, 197, 269, 273 Sonnet for Sister Kate, 187
Scott, George C., 184 Sonnet in Search of a Moor, 143, 187, 216
Scott, Hazel, 278 Sonnet to Hank Cinq, 99, 187
Sears, Al, 172, 173 Sophisticated Lady, 90, 210, 247
Second Hungarian Rhapsody (Liszt), Soul Soothing Beach, 256
62 Springtime in Africa, 238, 249
Second Portrait of The Lion, 146, 147 Star of Ethiopia, The (drama), 9, 10, 11, 226,
Sédor, Léopold, 242, 243 233, 234, 257, 261
Selassie, Haile, 3, 225, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, Star-Crossed Lovers, The, 138, 187, 188
262 Stardust, 214
Seldes, Gilbert, 40, 50 Stearns, Marshall, 227, 280
Senegal, 224, 225, 237, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, Stewart, Milton, 162
249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256 Stewart, Rex, 169, 261, 281
Senghor, 242, 243, 244, 251, 252 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 166
Sepia Panorama, 89, 120 Stokowski, Leopold, 43, 45, 56, 58, 69
Seuss, Dr., 293 Stomp for Beginners, 129
Index 307
Stormy Weather, 214 Traill, Sinclair, 96, 98

Stratemann, Klaus, 22 Transblucency, 90, 131, 253
Strauss, Johann, 54, 55 Tristano, Lennie, 222
Stravinsky, Igor, xvii, 22, 45, 51, 53, 54, 68, 179, Tucker, Mark, 9, 11, 12, 67, 123, 198, 199
182, 189 Turner, Nat, 234
Strayhorn, Billy, xix, xx, 108, 122, 129, 137, Tynes, Margaret, 273, 286, 287
138, 145, 155, 162, 164, 167, 173, 174,
175, 176, 177, 182, 185, 187, 188, 189, Ulanov, Barry, 13, 267
190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 209, 219, U.S. Steel Hour (television program), 186, 215,
221, 236, 237, 253, 265, 266, 269, 273, 266, 270, 276
274, 284, 287, 290, 292, 297, 298 Unknown Session, 145
Such Sweet Thunder, xix, xx, 93, 99, 138, 143, Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them
177–96, 215, 216, 223, 266, 296 Up and Down), 187, 188, 189, 192, 194,
Sullivan, Arthur, 97 216
Sweet Georgia Brown, 290, 295 Uptown Downbeat, 117, 120, 121
symphonic jazz, xvii, 41, 42, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, UWIS Suite, 253
51, 53, 54, 55, 59, 62, 63, 65, 66, 202, 272,
273, 286, 289 variety. See vaudeville
Symphony in Black (film), xx, 1, 11, 12, 13, 14, vaudeville, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 23, 41, 62, 64, 77,
20, 24, 62 78–82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 93, 101,
106, 116, 163, 226, 227, 272, 273
Takahashi, Yuji, 166 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 97
Take the “A” Train, 95, 98, 205, 213, 248, 296 Venuti, Joe, 52
Tall, Papa Ibra, 250 Vesey, Denmark, 234
Taruskin, Richard, 159 Vidor, King, 24
Tatum, Art, 89, 140, 185 Virgin Jungle, 238, 249
Taylor, Billy, 110, 119 Voce, Steve, 93
Taylor, Cecil, 133, 136
Taylor, Deems, 69 Wagner, Richard, 67
Teachout, Terry, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 225 Waksman, Steve, 221
Telecasters, The, 187, 216 Walker, Alice, 196
Tenderly, 98 Wall, The (Pink Floyd), 217
Terry, Clark, 98, 187, 193, 271, 273, 280, 281, Waller, Thomas “Fats”, 89, 111, 114
290, 295 Walton, William, 97
Theile, Bob, 220 War Requiem (Britten), 100
Things Ain’t What They Used to Be, 26, 98 Warm Valley, 122
Thomas, Louis, 110 Warren, Guy, 235, 236, 238, 239, 240
Thomson, Virgil, 45 Warren, Harry, 28, 73
Thornhill, Claude, 164 Washington, Fredi, 20, 21, 22, 23
Three Little Words, 214 Washingtonians, 229
Tiger Rag, 38, 80 Webern, Anton, 182
Tippy-Toeing through the Jungle Garden, 254 Webster, Ben, 120, 123, 169
Tizol, Juan, 165, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 263 Weill, Kurt, 54, 185, 186
Togo Brava Suite, 254, 255, 256, 262 Weinstein, Norman, 282, 283
Tomkins, Les, 104 Welles, Orson, 45, 183, 274, 277, 278
Tommy (The Who), 217 West End Blues, 116
Tone Parallel to Harlem, xix, 103, 137, 179, 180, West Indian Dance, 284
213 West Indian Pancake, 101
Toscanini, Arturo, 33, 42, 43, 45, 47 West Side Story (Bernstein), 182, 183, 184, 189
Towler, Edward, 267, 273 Whale, James, 12
Townsend, Irving, 216, 217, 265, 266, 268, 278, Whaley, Tom, 164, 165, 170, 174, 176
287 What a Wonderful World (Armstrong), 29
308 Index
What Else, 270, 284, 292 Wilson, Derby, 79

What Is Jazz?, 296 Wilson, John S., 178, 276
Whetsol, Arthur, 20, 21 Wood, Natalie, 183
Whispering Tiger, 80 Woode, Jimmy, 187
White, Quentin “Rocky,” 258, 260, 261, 262 Woodman, Britt, 172, 187
Whiteman, Paul, 41, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, Woodyard, Sam, 96, 145, 220, 236, 242, 247,
56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 73, 74, 249, 252, 263, 289
125, 212, 228, 286, 288 Wriggle, John, 215
Who Knows?, 137 Wright, Richard, 188, 196
Who, the, 217
Willard, Patricia, 258 Yamekraw (film), 22, 24, 28
William Morris Agency, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 68, You Better Know It, 270, 271, 273, 281, 284, 290
69, 204 Your Love Has Faded, 162
Williams, Cootie, 87, 163, 169, 170, 171, 173
Williams, Mary Lou, 164 Zak, Albin, 202, 221
Williams, Ned, 57 Zambia, 224, 225, 243, 261, 262
Willson, Meredith, 73 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 62, 64
Wilmer, Valerie, 103 Zolotow, Maurice, 234

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Duke Ellington Studies

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Duke Ellington Studies

Duke Ellington (1899–1974) is widely considered the jazz tradi-

john howland is Professor of Music History at the Norwegian

Edited by john howland

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First published 2017

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ISBN 978-0-521-76404-9 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy

List of Illustrations page [vii]

1 Ellington the Entertainer: Pageantry and Prophecy in

2 Marketing to the Middlebrow: Reconsidering Ellingtonia,

3 “Art or Debauchery?”: The Reception of Ellington in the

4 “Nobody Was Looking”: The Unparalleled Jazz Piano

5 “People Wrap Their Lunches in Them”: Duke Ellington

6 The Moor’s Revenge: The Politics of Such Sweet Thunder [177]

7 Duke Ellington in the LP Era [197]

8 Authentic Synthetic Hybrid: Ellington’s Concepts of Africa

9 “The Mother of All Albums”: Revisiting Ellington’s A

1.1 Michael Leavitt, MoveOn.org, A Little Green from a Lot of

All examples in Chapter 4 are transcribed from the recordings by Bill

9.1A “A Drum Is a Woman Part 2 (Drums Rab)” (1:31ff.) [287]

6.1 Formal design of “Such Sweet Thunder,” movement 1 from

bill dobbins is Professor of Jazz Studies and Contemporary Media at

revolve around music and philosophy and, more particularly, on magical

and Cambridge University, and studied composition at the Manhattan

also a professional saxophonist and longtime jazz radio broadcaster. He

The steady stream of trade publications, critical attention, and perfor-

speaks to non-specialists in jazz historiography, as it provides an ideal

as the character. This syntax of “instant character” is almost unavoidably

understand Ellington’s highly individual process of writing music – i.e., of

as well as on his approach to cultural production. Importantly, they show-

I would like to express my most sincere thanks to Edward Green, whose

Every effort has been made to secure necessary permissions to reproduce

Cohen, America Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America

A film star’s image – imagine those of Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn,

a limited field of options, or (put another way) how to choose from

representation on which Obama drew ranges across all divisions of Ameri-

audience entertainment without compromising the dignity of the Negro

campaign did not depend upon this analytical conception of changing

article that took part in a discourse of historical reclamation that played

Figure 1.2 Justin Hampton, That One: History (2008)

Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1935).26 Tucker speculates that Ellington

Look, now, is this not the same golden sun

30 Tucker, “Genesis,” 67–86. 31 Howland, Uptown, 135.

quasi-geometric mass forms that recall the muralist iconography of the

is latent. It is on this note that Ellington concludes both Symphony in Black

Elsewhere I have defined an “image” as a multimedia constellation of

35 Duke Ellington, “Beige,” 5.

Entertainment is a professional practice of giving you what you want –

47 Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts?, 63.

praised this arrangement’s “stunts” as “exceptionally original and strik-

Make no mistake: Black and Tan Fantasy is a masterpiece, and I am not

49 R. D. Darrell, “Criticism in the Phonograph Monthly Review (1927–1931),” reprinted in Tucker,

principles” are another man’s “emphasis on detail at the expense of the

his composition on the piano and giving Whetsol practical instructions

53 Gabbard, “Duke’s Place,” 163.

54 Howland, Uptown, 91.

a novel variation on the kinds of crowd-pleasing shots we see in the more