In the early 20th century African-American composers began to write extended musical depictions of black American life–Scott Joplin with his unstaged opera Treemonisha, pianist James P. Johnson with his Yamekraw: a Negro Rhapsody, and–perhaps most successfully–William Grant Still with his Afro-American Symphony in 1931. That same year Duke Ellington told a reporter, “I’m going to compose a musical evolution of the Negro race.” It took Ellington 12 years to achieve his goal–the 45-minute-long Black, Brown and Beige Suite: a Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America, which is now considered to be one of his greatest works.
Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige was the first of several large-scale orchestral compositions undertaken by jazz musicians that portrayed the journey of black people from Africa to enslavement in America, emancipation, and the subsequent difficulties and complexities of life in a racist and segregated country. He originally conceived it as a work called Boola, with five intended movements–Africa, Slaveship, Plantation, Harlem, and a finale. (A long narrative treatment that survives illuminates the backstory of Boola and the subsequent Black, Brown and Beige symphony.) Spurred on by the creation of his 1941 musical Jump For Joy, Ellington finally wrote Black, Brown and Beige in a burst of a few weeks for his January 1943 debut at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The audience received it enthusiastically, but New York critics were less kind; Paul Bowles called it “formless and meaningless,” while John Briggs of the New York Post said, “Mr. Ellington was saying musically the same thing he had said earlier in the evening, only this time he took forty-five minutes to do it,” and jazz impresario John Hammond was moved to write an article titled, “Is the Duke deserting jazz?” Although he never performed it in its entirety again after 1943, Ellington would revisit Black, Brown and Beige periodically for the rest of his career, making studio recordings of its various movements in 1944, 1958, and in the mid-1960s.
Saxophonist and composer-arranger Oliver Nelson weighed in nearly 20 years after Ellington with Afro-American Sketches, a jazz suite in seven parts. Unlike Ellington, Nelson undertook his project with some reluctance; in the liner notes to the album he attributed his hesitancy to “the lack of honesty in a lot of Afro-jazz LPs on the market, but mostly because I didn’t know a lot about Africa, African people and culture and most important, nothing about African music and rhythm.” Embarking on intense study of those subjects, Nelson spanned his musical portrayals from conflicts between African natives and slave traders to the contemporary civil-rights Freedom Riders of 1961. “I have at last realized the importance of my African and Negro heritage,” Nelson concluded in the liner notes, “and through this enlightenment I was able to compose 40 minutes of original music which is a true extension of my musical soul.” Nelson would go on to compose and record an extended work with an explicit Ellingtonian allusion, a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. called Black, Brown and Beautiful (parts of it can be heard in the Night Lights program Dear Martin).
Texan clarinetist John Carter’s epic, five-album suite Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, was recorded across the span of the 1980s. “What the African brought with him gave way to the blues, church music, jazz, rock, and all forms of American music,” Carter stated, “and I wanted to contribute some musical thoughts of my own in an artistic, historical way.” Critic Gary Giddins calls Roots and Folklore “a capacious vision of America’s motley musical history… Fields (one of the albums making up the suite) counters the prevailing lack of ambition and fear of innovation that stifled so much recording during the 1980s.” Describing the obstacles jazz artists of that decade faced in gaining record-company support for large-orchestral and innovative projects, Giddins says, “Carter solved the first problem by voicing his musicians in such a way as to suggest a larger group and the second by refusing to accept the idea that by virtue of recording he is in the business of producing marketable product.”
We’ll hear music from all three of these extended African-American musical histories, and we’ll also talk with author and scholar Michael McGerr about the historical contexts from which these recordings emerged. (McGerr can be heard as on the WFIU documentary Jump For Joy: Duke Ellington’s Celebratory Musical as well.)
Read a blow-by-blow analysis of the January 1943 performance of Ellington’s Black, Brown and Beige:
I. Black
II. Brown
III. Beige
You can hear the January 1943 performance of “Brown” in the previous Night Lights program When Betty Met the Duke: Betty Roche. John Gennari discusses some of the critical reaction to the debut of Ellington’s work in the previous Night Lights program A Few Words About Jazz, which also includes an excerpt of the 1943 Carnegie performance of “Black.”
Air date: February 9
Photo of Ellington 78 folio by Antony Pepper.
