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?

This Day in Classical Music History (Goodman, Bernstein Debut Poulenc’s Posthumous ‘Clarinet Sonata’)

April 10, 1963—The debut of Francis Poulenc’s Clarinet Sonata turned into an unanticipated memorial at Carnegie Hall. With the 63-year-old French composer dying of a massive heart attack only four months before, Leonard Bernstein replaced him at the piano, accompanying featured soloist Benny Goodman.

Twenty-five years before, Goodman’s performance at Carnegie had been a brassy, joyous affair that gave the imprimatur of New York’s most serious musical venue to big-band jazz. In contrast, his appearance in the Poulenc piece took on a somber tone.

In terms of personality, Poulenc and the "King of Swing" could not have differed more. The American, for all the joy his music gave the Greatest Generation, was such a taskmaster that years later, musicians who once played for him spoke of what a martinet he could be. Poulenc, far more of an easygoing eccentric, also displayed far more duality: "something of the monk and something of the rascal," according to music critic Claude Rostand. Never entirely able to sublimate his homosexual orientation, he also was a devout Roman Catholic who wrote an opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites (1957), that stands a fair chance of becoming a staple of modern musical theater—even though it features no romance or melodrama, only an order of nuns martyred during the French Revolution.

In terms of music, however, Poulenc and Goodman evinced a similar crossover sensibility. From early in his career, Poulenc composed witty, jazz-inflected pieces as well as the melodic, Romantic-influenced works for which he was better known. By the 1960s, with bebop pushing to the side his own big-band sound, Goodman increasingly widened his musical perspective to take in classical works. In the next two decades, he would perform classical works with his daughters acccompanying him on the piano and cello, and he died in 1986 while playing a Brahms sonata on his clarinet in his New York home.

Goodman had commissioned this piece from Poulenc, and it turned out to be one of the last (if not the last) works the Frenchman wrote before his untimely death. Bernstein, another musician with crossover tendencies (Poulenc deeply admired his West Side Story), was honored to step in for his friend.

For a fine assessment of Poulenc’s career (the piece that got me interested in him in the first place), this one by Terry Teachout of The Wall Street Journal is the place to start. This YouTube clip, a performance by Anton Dressler on the clarinet and John Novacek at the piano, also gives a fine sense of Goodman’s fortune in commissioning this sterling late-career work.

Quote of the Day (Clive James, on Benny Goodman, Jazz and Race)

“A man like Benny Goodman, for example, can’t possibly be fitted into a schematic history that would base itself on the white exploitation of a black invention. He carried within himself the only answer to the conflict, and, as things have turned out, he presaged the outcome: a measure of tolerance and mutual respect, and at least a step toward a colour-blind creative world. Being white, he was able to translate his prodigious talent into economic power: the very power to which black musicians, however successful, were always denied access. But Goodman used his power to break the race barrier. Though his mixed small groups existed mainly in the recording studios and rarely on stage—the Carnegie Hall appearance with Count Basie was strictly an interlude—the music they made was the emblem of a political future, and in the aesthetic present it was a revelation.” --Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts (2007)

All hail Benny Goodman, the “King of Swing,” born 100 years ago today in Chicago, one of 12 siblings in a dirt-poor Russian emigrant family.

The Clive James quote above refers to Goodman’s integration of jazz, what is often called America’s unique contribution to culture—a full decade before Branch Rickey did the same thing for America’s pastime by hiring Jackie Robinson. The big-band leader had already recorded with the African-American pianist Teddy Wilson as part of a trio (along with regular Goodman drummer Gene Krupa; the three are pictured in the image accompanying this post) when he was convinced by Helen Oakley, a young jazz writer, to have the small group play in concert.

The chemistry on that Easter Sunday in 1936 was perfect—“The three of us,” Goodman recalled, “worked together as if were had been born to play that way”—and the audience in the Urban Room of Chicago’s Congress Hotel clapped and roared approvingly. The later addition of virtuouso vibraphonist Lionel Hampton made it a quartet.

At this point, it becomes necessary to interject with what, to his contemporaries in the music world, was the obvious: Goodman was a driven, excellence-demanding professional entertainer, but not a saint. In a PBS “American Masters” documentary on his life broadcast some years ago, his daughter remembered how, brusquely, even brutally, he had discouraged her from a career as a musician by saying point-blank that she had no talent.

Gary Giddins’ “The Mirror of Swing” essay in the great anthology Reading Jazz, while celebrating his musical achievements, also depicted an ironic juxtaposition: a galaxy of jazzmen, gathered together for a tribute in Goodman’s honor, yet overwhelmingly carping about his “legendary cheapness, absentmindedness, mandarin discipline, rudeness to musicians, and various eccentricities.”

That’s not the end of it, by any means. Dan Morgenstern’s essay in Living With Jazz: A Reader puts the matter within a larger framework by quoting another musician, Mel Powell, that Goodman was “one of the very, very few white people I’ve known who had not a single fiber of racism in him. He was absolutely, authentically color-blind….One of the real giveaways to his outlook was that he could be as rude to a black man as to a white man. He did not get patronizing or suddenly gentle. Not at all. And I always found that admirable.”

Longtime devotees of professional football will recognize the same attitude in a man four years Goodman’s junior, Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. “He treats us all alike,” one of his players supposedly said, “like dogs.”

Scions of immigrant families, the two men also burned to succeed, driving themselves perhaps more mercilessly than anyone else. Professional triumph came at something of a price in both cases. Goodman, as we’ve seen, was more admired than loved, while Lombardi’s ferocious, inward-turning anxiety probably fed the cancer that killed him at age 57.

Two last aspects of the James quote are left for me to remark on. The first is race. James was reacting to several critics and musicians who have downgraded Goodman in comparison with black musicians and band leaders. This seems to me churlish. Just as it is inconceivable to deny the central African-American contribution to jazz, it is also impossible to deny Goodman’s part in the story. He excelled on the clarinet in the jazz, pop and classical realms—something that few other musicians of any race could match.

Second, though the occasion for this post is Goodman’s birth, I’d like to close by going full-circle: to his death. His daughter, hurt as she was by her father’s thoughtlessness, could also only marvel at his perseverance in the face of cancer, making sure to practice every day, no matter how awful he felt. Goodman died, in fact, rehearsing for a Mostly Mozart festival in June 1986.

Fans of the jazz legend might want to listen to WKCR, the radio station of my alma mater, Columbia University, as they air, through June, a tribute to Goodman in celebration of his centennial.

This Day in Cultural History

January 16, 1938 – For one night “The King of Swing,” Benny Goodman, captured the holy temple of classical music, New York’s Carnegie Hall, for the jazz world, bringing to the form unparalleled recognition and respectability.

In a way, it was only natural that Goodman should be an ambassador for the form, because he was used to breaking down barriers. One of 12 children born to Russian immigrants, the Chicago native had, by the time he was 30, vaulted to the top of one of the few art forms that were distinctively American, jazz.

Taught for two years by the classically trained clarinetist Franz Schoepp but soon falling under the influence of New Orleans jazzmen like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, Goodman had already, by the time of the Carnegie Hall appearance, become the first prominent jazz musician to perform the classical repertory. In 1936, he played publicly with two African-American musicians, pianist Teddy Wilson and vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, then hired them for his band, breaking the jazz color line separating white from black.

Orchestrated by entertainment impresario Sol Hurok, the Carnegie Hall concert sold out weeks in advance. The 28-year-old Goodman was tentative at first, using the first half hour to highlight guest soloists from the Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestras. His 13 tuxedo-clad sidemen (and one sidewoman) may also have been nervous, with trumpeter Harry James later confessing to feeling “like a whore at church.” But Goodman gained momentum when he came out with his “small group,” including Wilson and Hampton. (Indeed, notes critic Will Friedwald, their appearance might have marked the first instance when a Carnegie Hall audience saw black and white musicians playing side by side.)

After intermission, Goodman’s big band finally showed what the dance-crazy kids at New York's Paramount had been screaming about a couple of years before. Rousing renditions of "Bei Mir Bist Du Schon" and "Swingtime in the Rockies" built the audience’s enthusiasm until late in the show, when Goodman unfurled his piece de resistance: the orchestra’s barn-barning signature tune, “Sing, Sing, Sing.”

Goodman, drummer Gene Krupa, and trumpeter Harry James took rousing solo turns before Goodman turned the spotlight over to pianist Jess Stacy, who had never before been featured on this particular song. Stacy’s two-minute turn, evolving from steamboat stride to impressionist chords that reflected his interest in Ravel and Debussy, had audience members on the edge of their seats, wondering what could possibly come next – until Krupa and the rest of the band kicked in for the conclusion that left the capacity crowd hoarse.

Demanding of himself, Goodman was equally so with his band, insisting on precise arrangements and playing. In interview he gave critic Gary Giddins late in his career, Goodman – whose nickname “The Professor” might owe as much to his cerebral musicianship as to his owlish appearance – summed up the paradox at the heart of his career: “Listening to music is emotional. Sometimes you like something a lot, and another time you hate it. The whole goddamn thing about jazz is emotional. I like to feel the excitement. If it doesn’t come out as a wide endeavor – wild with restraint – it doesn’t have it.”

Beloved by the public throughout his 40-year career, Goodman was respected by fellow musicians for his accomplished playing but also universally scorned for displaying what Giddins called “his legendary cheapness, absentmindedness, mandarin discipline, rudeness to musicians, and various eccentricities.”

Even his liberal outlook on race was marked by his curmudgeonly nature. His later pianist-arranged Mel Powell remembered his boss this way to jazz critic Dan Morgenstern: “Benny was one of the very, very few white people I’ve known who had not a fiber of racism in him. He was absolutely, authentically color blind…One of the real giveaways to his outlook was that he could be as rude to a black man as to a white man. He did not get patronizing or suddenly gentle. Not at all. And I always found that admirable.”

Even family members were not exempt: a PBS documentary on his life included in an interview with one of his daughters, who recalled that when she was considering a career in music, he told her curtly she did not have the talent.

No matter how much of a martinet he might have been offstage, Goodman secured a distinct place for himself and the jazz world with his Carnegie Hall appearance. Its importance – and Goodman’s unique crossover appeal – was underscored on the 50th anniversary of the concert, when the great jazzman’s daughter, Rachel Goodman Edelson, handed one of her late father’s clarinets to Isaac Stern on stage as the first donation to a future museum at Carnegie Hall (later called the Rose Museum).