Flashback, January 1943: Ellington Debuts ‘Black, Brown and Beige’ at Carnegie Hall

Duke Ellington achieved a new level of prominence in January 1943—a month when his new management began marketing him as a multidimensional musical force—by debuting, with his big-band jazz orchestra, at Carnegie Hall. 

The concert, also marking the premiere of his 45-minute Black, Brown and Beige, was commercially successful, but also inaugurated a strain of commentary on the bandleader-composer-pianist that has endured to this day: the question of whether his genius was better suited to short or extended musical works.

The black-tie affair was marketed both as a charity ($5,000 raised for relief of Russia, America’s ally at the time in WWII) and as a celebration of Ellington’s 20 years as a bandleader. In the seven days before the big event, a barrage of ads, articles and radio spots orchestrated by his management, the William Morris Agency, promoted “National Duke Ellington Week.” To accommodate the overflow of such illustrious attendees as Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller, and Leopold Stokowski, roughly 200 people had to be seated onstage.

The attention brought by the concert was much wanted and much needed. Ellington had been privately peeved when Benny Goodman became the first jazz big-band leader to appear at Carnegie in 1938, and even more so when he believed his manager at the time, Irving Mills, had turned down a chance to book the band a year before Goodman’s landmark concert.

But Ellington was not primarily motivated by ego in wanting the appearance at one of New York’s principal cultural institutions: he felt that it would maintain the band’s public profile at a time when it desperately needed it.

A traditional vehicle for doing so—the release of an LP—had been foreclosed since August 1942, when the American Federation of Musicians, in a royalty-payment dispute with radio stations, forbade its members from making commercial recordings. 

There was little problem provoking interest on the West Coast, where the band had been particularly active for the past two years (mostly involved in making music for movies), but it was another matter on the Eastern Seaboard. A suggestion by his agent at William Morris that he go to Carnegie was the spark Ellington needed—and the bandleader thought he had the requisite material, a project he had spoken of as far back as 1930: “My African Suite. It will be in five parts, starting in Africa and ending with the history of the American Negro.”

The next six weeks became a struggle, at times frantic, to shape the material into a coherent whole. How much he cobbled together from a previously announced opera, Boola—which, in its subject matter, sounds like an altered form of African Suite—is difficult to say, as no performance, recording, or physical artifact remains of that aside from an unfinished scenario.

But the subject of that long-aborning project now formed an inextricable part of what he eventually subtitled "A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in. America."

In his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress, Ellington noted that the Carnegie concert was the only time he never experienced stage fright: “I just didn’t have time. I couldn’t afford the luxury of being scared.” Even up to the day of performance, he was making changes in the program.

At the beginning of the 1940s, Ellington and his band had reached a creative and commercial zenith. But from this point on to the end of his life, he devoted considerably more energy to extended forms: thirty-odd concert suites and three “Sacred Concerts.”

Most Ellington observers have been kinder than biographer James Lincoln Collier, who thought these longer compositions represented “one of the great artistic errors in jazz history.” But the majority have been critical, and certainly so in the immediate aftermath of the 1943 concert, when Ellington’s attempt to add new orchestral colors failed to satisfy neither jazz nor classical purists.

Even the admiring cultural critic Terry Teachout, in his 2013 biography Duke, felt compelled to write that Ellington might have “fumbled the ball just short of the goal line.” But if the organic unity prized by critics proved elusive, the vivacity and power of the music endure.

Take, for instance, “Come Sunday,” one of the most forceful expressions of the composer’s spirituality. In its original instrumental version, it spotlighted alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. But I came to know it, three decades ago, through a transcendent 1958 recording featuring soul-piercing vocals by Mahalia Jackson, with Ellington himself gently accompanying her on piano.

I’m not so sure, in any case, about the overall validity of critical pronouncements on artists attempting a larger canvass. Critics may prefer the small scale because artists can concentrate their efforts there more easily to achieve perfection. But would critics really want to trade a perfect Mark Twain short story for an admittedly imperfect but still magnificent Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?