Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, D.C. on April
29, 1899. His career as a popular musician began in his adolescence when
he performed jazz pieces on the piano in an ice-cream parlor in
Washington, and after that formed his own jazz group. In 1923 he came to
New York where he soon thereafter formed a jazz band which performed at
the Kentucky Club in Harlem. Discovered by Irving Mills, the publisher,
Ellington was booked for the Cotton Club where he remained several years
and established his fame as an outstanding exponent of real jazz—as
pianist, conductor of his orchestra, composer, and arranger. He has
since joined the all-time greats of jazz music, acclaimed in night
clubs, on the Broadway stage and Hollywood screen, over the radio, on
records, and in triumphant tours throughout the music world.
As a composer Ellington is famous for his popular songs (“Mood Indigo,”
“Sophisticated Lady” and so forth) and short instrumental jazz pieces
(_Black and Tan Fantasy_, _Creole Rhapsody_, _East St. Louis Toodle-oo_,
etc.) All this falls within the province of either popular music or
jazz, and for this reason cannot be considered here.
Ellington has also produced a rich repertory of larger works for
orchestra which have a place in the permanent library of semi-classical
music in the same way that Gershwin’s larger works do. Skilfully
utilizing the fullest resources of jazz techniques, styles, and idioms,
Ellington has created in these larger works an authentically American
music. He himself prefers to consider many of these works as “Negro
music” rather than jazz; nevertheless, in their blues harmonies, jazz
colorations, and melodic and rhythmic techniques these works represented
jazz music at its very best.
Perhaps the most distinguished of these symphonic-jazz works is _Black,
Brown and Beige_, an extended work which Ellington introduced with his
orchestra in Carnegie Hall, New York, in 1943, and which he described as
a “tonal parallel of the Negro in America.” The first movement, “Black,”
is a musical picture of the Negro at work, singing at his labors on the
docks and levees in the slavery period before the Civil War. An alto
saxophone solo brings on a plangent Spiritual, “Come Sunday.” The second
movement, “Brown,” represents the wars in which Negroes have
participated. A tenor solo sings an eloquent blues of the unsettled
condition of the Negro after the Civil War. The contemporary Negro is
the inspiration for the finale, “Beige,” utilizing jazz idioms and
styles in portraying the period of the Twenties, Thirties and Forties.
Many facets of Negro life are drawn in brief musical episodes, including
the Negro church and school, and the Negro’s aspiration towards
sophistication. The work ends on a patriotic note, prophesying that the
Negro’s place in the American way of life is secure.