Duke (43 page)

Part of what pushed Ellington toward writing the multimovement piece about the black experience in America that he had been mulling over for more than a decade was his urgent need for publicity. On August 1, four days after Ivie Anderson cut her last studio sides with the band, the American Federation of Musicians banned its members from making commercial recordings, claiming that they were being cheated by radio stations that played their records without paying royalties. The unreleased sides that Ellington had already made would be issued in dribs and drabs throughout the first part of the ban, but otherwise he and his musicians could only be heard in person, on radio, or on the wartime “V-Discs” that the AFM permitted Ellington and other artists to record for distribution to soldiers, sailors, and marines. Not until the end of 1944 would the band make another record for Victor.

The AFM strike shut off one of Ellington’s most powerful engines of publicity, and because he had spent so much of the past two years in California, his East Coast profile was low. Hence, as he recalled it, the need to cause talk in New York: “William Morris says to me, ‘What you need is a Carnegie Hall concert.’ So I started whipping up material.” The “material” was
Black, Brown and Beige,
on which he began work during a theater engagement in Hartford: “The light was not too good for writing music, and the movie they were showing was
The Cat Woman
. It was about a woman who used to change into a cat and do people in. Since I could see what was going on on the screen, it sometimes got pretty scary back there in the dark.”

The starting point was a thirty-three-page typescript scenario titled “
Black, Brown and Beige
by Duke Ellington” that is an expanded version of an earlier, incomplete holograph scenario for
Boola,
his long-planned opera about black history. While neither scenario is dated, Ellington claimed as early as 1938 to have “completed” an opera, and in 1940 he began to refer to
Boola
by name in interviews. After
Jump for Joy
closed
,
he discussed the project with the classical music critic Alfred Frankenstein, who explained to the readers of the
San Francisco Chronicle
that while the opera was not yet done, “you gather that he could finish it if he wanted to in less time than it takes to run through a couple of choruses.” Ellington told Frankenstein that “all arrangements of historic American Negro music have been made by conservatory-trained musicians who inevitably handle it with a European technique. It’s time a big piece of music was written from the inside by a Negro.” He then talked about
Boola
in detail, describing it in much the same way that he had described his unwritten
African Suite
:

“Boola,” says Ellington, is the name Negro historians use to symbolize their race. “If they want to tell you that Negroes took part in this or that event,” said Ellington, “they will say ‘Boola was there.’ My opera traces Boola’s whole history in four scenes. The first scene is laid in Africa. . . . The second scene is Negro life in slave times, the third, Negro life in the period after the Civil war, and the fourth, Negro life today. There isn’t any continuous plot, but there is one symbolic figure—Boola himself—who appears throughout.”

Might he have written the
Boola
scenario around this time? His claims to have finished a piece could not be trusted until it was played in public—and sometimes not even then. Except for “Ko-Ko,” which may or may not have come from the score for
Boola,
no part of the opera was ever performed or recorded. All that survives of it is the incomplete scenario. But Ellington also said in an interview published a week prior to the Carnegie Hall concert that he had “taken some of the music from [
Boola
] and turned it into a half-hour tone poem for his band,” and he later told Barry Ulanov that
Boola
had “yielded much of the material” for
Black, Brown and Beige
. It’s possible, though, that what he meant was that the scenario for
Black, Brown and Beige
was based on the
Boola
scenario, both of which contain indications for musical treatment: “A message . . . shot through the jungle by drums. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Like a tom-tom in steady precision.” The “Work Song” section is described in comparably evocative words as “not a song of great Joy—not a triumphant song—but a song of Burden—a song punctuated by the grunt of Heaving a pick or axe.” Likewise “Come Sunday,” which he envisioned as a portrait of a plantation church that slaves were not allowed to attend: “And now Come Sunday—that nice quiet little house with the steeple . . . the music was so sweet and tender even from that distance.”

In June of 1943
Variety
reported that Ellington was writing a book about
Black, Brown and Beige
in which “the story will be printed on the upper half of each page in the book, with the music related to each portion below on the same page . . . [He] feels that detailing the thoughts which motivated the work will help toward a better understanding of it.” The text of the book would presumably have been based on the scenario, but outside of selected passages that were included in the liner notes for an album of excerpts from
Black, Brown and Beige
that was released by Victor in 1944, no part of it appeared in print during his lifetime. Had the scenario been published in its entirety, it might have been easier for critics to grasp the meaning of the piece, and to see how firmly rooted it was in the historical narrative that he was seeking to depict in music. In 1943 Ellington told an interviewer that he had assembled “a collection of 800 books on Negro history and prehistoric African art which he has read many times.” While he liked on occasion to pretend to be better read than he was, the
Boola
and
Black, Brown and Beige
scenarios demonstrate Ellington’s wide knowledge of black history. They also suggest that he had undeveloped but nonetheless genuine talent as a writer:

A song eased the lash. The whip fell

Less frequently across his weary back.

Boola sang. His master smiled. His slaves

Were happy. He complimented himself on

His great philanthropy.

What neither scenario does is shed light on the meaning of the work’s ambiguous title. According to Mercer Ellington, it was meant to suggest the intraracial prejudice of which his light-skinned father was well aware: “
Black, Brown and Beige
was his criticism of his own race. And their prejudices within itself. There were these different castes: the black, the brown or tan ones and the ones light enough to pass for white. And yet they wanted, as a whole . . . recognition and equal rights and yet within themselves they restricted each other.” But Ellington himself said in 1956 that the title of
Black, Brown and Beige
referred to “the [black] state of mind, not the color of the skin,” going on to explain that the collective self-image of blacks in America mirrored their changing social and economic situation: “So gradually it got lighter . . . but it never got quite white.” Either way, it says much about Duke Ellington that a status-conscious child of the black middle class should have chosen to draw so direct a parallel between self-image and skin tone in a work that celebrated the history of his race.

 • • • 

Six scant weeks after he started writing
Black, Brown and Beige,
Ellington stepped in front of a capacity crowd at Carnegie Hall and unveiled his grandest composition. The concert, a black-tie affair, was the climax of what the William Morris Agency had been promoting as “National Duke Ellington Week,”
and the advance publicity paid off. Betty Roché, who had replaced Ivie Anderson in September, was stunned to see so many famous faces in the auditorium: “I [saw] some ordinary people sitting there, and next to them might be Glenn Miller, and next to them Eleanor Roosevelt. Frank Sinatra came backstage and brought me a bouquet of roses. I was introduced to Mrs. Roosevelt and Glenn Miller—just everybody—Leopold Stokowski.” As always, Ellington and his men were dressed to kill.
Time
reported that the members of his “flamboyant black band” were wearing “grey coats, each with a jet black carnation in his buttonhole.” And while their leader sounded nervous onstage, he later claimed not to have been, even though he had been working on
Black, Brown and Beige
all the way up to the wire. “That first night at Carnegie was the only time in my life that I didn’t have stage fright,” he recalled in
Music Is My Mistress
. “I just didn’t have time—I couldn’t afford the luxury of being scared.”

What the audience heard that evening was a forty-five-minute work in three movements that defied easy categorization. Howard Taubman had called it a “tone poem,” while
Billboard
’s Elliott Grennard, who responded more warmly to the piece than most of his colleagues, opted for a different comparison: “To this reviewer’s ears
Black, Brown and Beige
is the first jazz symphony of its time and will point the way to a whole school of jazz literature for the concert stage.” Black listeners with longer memories might well have heard in it a latter-day counterpart of the historical pageants like
The Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song, and Story
that had been so popular in Ellington’s youth. Like
Reminiscing in Tempo
and
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue
before it,
Black, Brown and Beige
contains little improvisation—the solos are written out—and some of it, like the introduction to “The Blues,” barely sounds like jazz at all. Structurally speaking, the piece is an uneasy hybrid of concisely argued musical statements à la “Ko-Ko” and the Whiteman-style symphonic jazz of
Creole Rhapsody,
whose self-contained sections are stitched together with elaborate transitional passages.

“Black,” the twenty-two-minute first movement whose subject is life under slavery, is the most fully sustained of the three parts. In it, Ellington said, he sought

to show the close relationship between work songs and spirituals. “Work Song,” used in many forms, recognized that a work song was sung as you worked, so that there was a place for the song and a place where you grunt. “Come Sunday,” the spiritual theme, was intended to depict the movement inside and outside the [white] church, as seen by workers who stood outside, watched, listened, but were not admitted. This is developed to the time when the workers have a church of their own. The section ends with promises.

More so than in any other section of
Black, Brown and Beige,
Ellington’s music here is explicitly programmatic. From the thundering timpani and “talking” trombone of “Work Song” to the diaphanous orchestral accompaniment to the “sermon” preached by Johnny Hodges in “Come Sunday,” he is painting pictures in sound, and doing so with a feel for orchestral color as sure as anything to be heard in the music of Debussy or Ravel. And while the sharp contrasts of tone that he believed to be intrinsic to the black temperament (“They pass quickly from the extremes of joy to gloom and back again”) threaten at times to overwhelm the movement’s tenuous structural unity, “Black” makes sense to the ear when it is approached not as a systematically developed musical statement but as a sequence of freely related episodes.

“Brown,” the second movement, is a tribute to “the contribution made by the Negro to this country in blood.” It opens with the Latin-flavored “West Indian Dance,” which portrays the free Haitians who fought in the Revolutionary War, connected by an overelaborate transitional passage to a swinging section representing the Civil War and “the lighter attitude prevailing after the Proclamation of Emancipation.” Both episodes are attractive but aimless and seem to have no real relationship to one another. Next comes “The Blues,” the most carefully wrought episode of
Black, Brown and Beige
. Inez Cavanaugh’s notes for the album place this section “at the end of the Spanish-American War, when the many Negro soldiers decorated for their heroism at San Juan Hill returned to their homes.” She then quotes from Ellington’s scenario: “Many soldiers returned to attract other men’s mates. Some returned to find their own women otherwise attracted . . . it was the old story of the love triangle. In all love triangles there is the short side—and he who loves and loses is on the short side—
with
the Blues!”

“The Blues” contains the only vocal passage in
Black, Brown and Beige,
for which Ellington supplied his own lyric, the best he ever wrote: “The Blues ain’t nothin’ but a cold grey day, / And all night long it stays that way.” The opening lines are set as a minor-key recitative accompanied by wailing dissonances that border on atonality. Ben Webster then supplies a fulsome interlude that leads into a contrasting major-key ensemble, followed by a reprise of the bleak harmonies with which the section began. Betty Roché, who sang “The Blues” at Carnegie Hall, was a warm-voiced alto whom Ellington neatly described as having “a soul inflection in a bop state of intrigue” and whose first stint with the band, which lasted for eighteen months, was far too short.

From the tightly organized lamentation of “The Blues,” Ellington plunged into “Beige,” a potpourri-like portrait of life in Harlem that is even harder to follow than the brief synopsis that Irving Kolodin supplied in his program notes for the Carnegie Hall concert:

The Harlem of the ’20s, hotcha, excitement, razz-ma-tazz, is mirrored in tom-toms and screaming brass. . . . But, as Ellington says, there are more churches in Harlem than ginmills. As for the Negro of the bands and the stage, Ellington has the epigram: “All they hear really is a few people trying to make a living.” A waltz shows the striving to sophistication, but underneath is the clamor of feeling which is yet undisciplined according to European standards. It is a panorama of life—a longer “Harlem Air Shaft,” showing the struggles for expression, the yearning for education which can rarely be used, the true straight line of the Negro’s character which is too often turned aside and deflected by his surroundings.