# The Duke Dilemma: Symphonic Ellington is a mainstay — but still in need of revival: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2022/02/18/the-duke-dilemma-symphonic-ellington-is-a-mainstay-but-still-in-need-of-revival-video-photos/
- Published: 2022-02-18T23:23:33+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Duke Ellington should need no introduction. He did it all. He wrote in the neighborhood
of 1,000 songs, many quickly becoming Great American Songbook classics. He transcended
musical and racial barriers. He brought jazz music, jazz thinking and jazz attitude
to a wide world of music, including the symphony orchestra, ballet, opera, Broadway
and the church. He concertized and recorded nonstop for a full five decades.**

Nor is Ellington ignored or unappreciated. There is by now a rich and rewarding 
scholarly literature on Ellington. A [statue of the Duke](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-may-05-ca-33973-story.html)
stands in front of Schoenberg Hall on the UCLA campus. The message is unmistakable:
Like Arnold Schoenberg, Ellington profoundly and categorically changed the course
of 20^(th) century music.

It would obviously be all too easy to believe that Ellington, who was born in 1899,
a year after Gershwin and a year before Copland, has easily achieved as central 
a place in American music and that his influence as all-pervasive as theirs. Ellington
is evidently all around us.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic, for instance, recently devoted two programs to the
symphonic Ellington. At the same time, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Wynton Marsalis’ 
big band that follows in Ellington’s footsteps, performed at the Reneé and Henry
Segerstrom Concert Hall, while the Harlem Quartet nodded in Ellington’s direction
at the Wallis. A couple of days later in Orlando, Fla., the Royal Philharmonic, 
on tour from London, added an Ellington evening to the celebratory concerts that
opened the city’s new Steinmetz Hall.

But Ellington’s legacy — as large and as meaningful as that of any artist in American
history — remains enigmatic. We honor him, put him on stamps, name streets and buildings
after him and teach him. You can’t begin to talk about American music or issues 
of race and music and not make Ellington a key part of the conversation. But we 
still don’t know what to do with Ellington beyond keeping his best-known tunes in
rotation.

This was patently clear at the L.A. Phil’s terrific concerts led by Thomas Wilkins,
who will also be conducting the L.A. Phil’s YOLA Sunday at So-Fi Stadium on the 
Super Bowl pregame show. Included were examples of Ellington’s most ambitious works
and ones that he said meant the most to him, “Black, Brown and Beige,” “New World
A-Comin’” and selections from his “Sacred Concerts.” Yet, these scores, while performed
[now and then](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-oct-05-ca-53523-story.html),
are not part of the canon.

Jazz-flavored symphonic music is another matter. Gershwin, Ravel, Stravinsky, Milhaud,
Copland, Bernstein, Shostakovich, Morton Gould and many more of the classical and
semi-classical white greats long ago made jazz a part of their symphonic vocabulary.
Orchestras are waking up to the fact that notable Black classical composers — William
Grant Still and George Walker in particular, but also others — impressively and 
importantly did so as well.

That, though, wasn’t Ellington. Rather than incorporate jazz into symphonic realm,
he invited the symphonic world into his wondrous realm. He wrote with symphonic 
intent for his improvising jazz orchestra; he wrote with jazz intent for the standard
symphony orchestra; and he happily embraced a hybrid in-between where he and some
of his musicians joined forces with the L.A. Phil or many another symphony orchestra.

In all of this, Ellington thought differently, being innovatively pre-symphonic 
and post-symphonic at the same time. It is not an exaggeration to think of him as
a Black Bach. Ellington wrote nonstop for specific performers and performances, 
as Bach did with, say, his weekly church cantatas. Like Bach, the Duke never repeated
himself. He used and reused whatever music he had at hand, brilliantly reimagining
his earlier pieces for new purposes. Bach was reputed to have been an improviser
of genius at the keyboard. We know for a fact that Ellington was one. We have the
recordings, and for some of us our memories.

At another extreme, Ellington created a modern orchestra that has had no equal. 
It was his instrument. He handpicked the musicians, every one a gifted soloist. 
Working with many of them for decades, he intimately knew their sound, their personalities
and their improvisational skills and styles. Ellington was a collaborative composer,
both with his writing partner, Billy Strayhorn, and the musicians in his orchestra.

The challenge of bringing all that pre-symphonic and the improvisational jazz band
changeability to a conventional symphony orchestra — in which the exquisitely trained
musicians to a far greater (if not complete) degree subsume individuality for the
greater good of a glorious collective — has long been deemed incompatible. That 
is changing, but gradually.

Ellington, consequently, wrote little for the conventional orchestra. He hardly 
needed to, what with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. But why shouldn’t he have had
access to the full resources of a symphony orchestra? Hearing the sheer grandeur
of “Black, Brown and Beige” and the splendor of the “Sacred Concerts” played by 
the L.A. Phil, one of the few orchestras with the versatility to do Ellington justice,
added a new magnificence.

![The Symphonic Ellington - Jazzheads: JH1206 - CD | Presto Music](https://d1iiivw74516uk.
cloudfront.net/eyJidWNrZXQiOiJwcmVzdG8tY292ZXItaW1hZ2VzIiwia2V5IjoiODA3NDExMy4xLmpwZyIsImVkaXRzIjp7InJlc2l6ZSI6eyJ3aWR0aCI6MzAwfSwianBlZyI6eyJxdWFsaXR5Ijo2NX0sInRvRm9ybWF0IjoianBlZyJ9LCJ0aW1lc3RhbXAiOjE0MzczODU4NTR9)

Even so, something was lost. “Black, Brown and Beige,” originally a 45-minute suite
premiered by Ellington and his orchestra in Carnegie Hall in 1943, is a strikingly
direct and deeply probing musical address on race and the experiences of African
Americans. It was the first in what he called — with “New World A-Comin’,” “Deep
South” Suite, “Liberian” Suite, “Harlem” — chapters in a historical musical epic.

Taken together, these works comprise a momentous symphonic canvas — a challenging,
visionary, profound and, yes, pleasure-giving evocation of what it means to be an
American in all our pain and promise. Yet this essential American epic has never
been performed, recorded or packaged as such. Thanks to the better streaming services,
you can, though none too easily, piece it together from various and often obscure
recordings, which does little to obviate its shocking neglect.

From the start, there was controversy. Some in the jazz world saw Ellington flirting
with the Carnegie swells as selling out; some in the symphonic world pegged him 
as entertainer from the world of popular music. “Black, Brown and Beige” was criticized
for being too long and discursive (it wasn’t). A discouraged Ellington never again
performed it complete. He recorded bits, and some of those bits became, as in a 
classic Grammy-winning 1958 disc with Mahalia Jackson, widely celebrated.

It is possible to piece together the original “Black, Brown and Beige,” as Marsalis
has on an excellent recording with Jazz at Lincoln Center, but the challenges of
bringing this work to life are very different than those faced by a symphony orchestra
performing a fully notated classical work. Ellington’s music was never a finished
product. He was, instead, on the same wavelength as his French conceptual artist
contemporary Marcel Duchamp, who said the viewer completes the artwork. For Ellington,
the time, place and audience of every performance was different, and so, naturally,
must be the music. A “recreated” “Black, Brown and Beige” will always be an anachronism.

Is the symphonic “Black, Brown and Beige” that is commonly trotted out any better?
It consists of an unimaginative orchestration of only the “Black” section by Maurice
Peress, with some input from Ellington, that practically defies the orchestra to
swing. The result falls flat on every recording, Peress’ included. Thanks to Wilkins
and several jazz players invited into the orchestral ranks, the saxophone section
in particular, it did finally come to life with the L.A. Phil.

But if Ellington is our Bach, then that’s how he needs to be treated. We don’t really
know how Bach’s music was performed or how it sounded three centuries ago. So we
make it up and always have. The Classical period composers classicized Bach. The
Romantics romanticized Bach. The Modernists modernized Bach. The fashion of our 
time is historically informed performance, or HIP, which, in the end, confronts 
performers with having to make creative choices. What was thought to be HIP 50 years
ago is not HIP now, so radically have research and ideas changed about old music
in new contexts.

Our Ellington problem is that we maybe know too much. Recordings readily tempt us
to emulate the past. Yet what was HIP for Ellington was to be _hip_ and always change
with the time, thus now demanding from us a continual flow of new arrangements, 
new ways of thinking, new resources and newly trained musicians. If Ellington is
to retain his importance to American music, then improvisation needs to be taught
as a standard skill for orchestral players.

Ellington did leave behind a handful of relatively standard symphonic scores. Wilkins,
who exhibits a musically assured and an Ellingtonian un-demonstrative cool, offered
superb performances of “Night Creature” and “The River” Suite, which were written
for dance, but even they are suitable for new orchestrations. But it is doubtful
that even here Ellington would have wanted them left alone. If Mahler, Ravel, Schoenberg
and Leopold Stokowski could orchestrate, or re-orchestrate the great masters, John
Adams or Tyshawn Sorey or others should feel welcome to update Ellington.

The hybrid approach, however, continues to work. In 1966, Ellington was the piano
soloist with the L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in his 13-minute piano concerto,“
New World A-Comin’.” The orchestra’s noted percussionist and composer, William Kraft,
was the sympathetic conductor. In his introduction, Ellington told the large crowd
in the amphitheater that “if we can bring about a state of bouncy buoyancy, or swing,
we will have made an advancement to a state of no war, no greed, no categorization.”
A broadcast recording of the concert, which can be found at [mixcloud.com](https://www.mixcloud.com/pautodo/duke-ellington-at-the-hollywood-bowl-in-1966/),
brings about a state of bouncy buoyancy not found on any commercial recording.

![The Symphonic Ellington | Discogs](https://i0.wp.com/img.discogs.com/oUd1lcMaUXoy4e9t40yGOoMrJWs%
3D/fit-in/600x600/filters%3Astrip_icc%28%29%3Aformat%28jpeg%29%3Amode_rgb%28%29%
3Aquality%2890%29/discogs-images/R-3743072-1527031865-4933.jpeg.jpg?resize=640%2C640&
ssl=1)

At Disney Hall last week, Gerald Clayton was the soloist. He was not bouncy but 
supplied buoyancy through a thoughtful fresh intelligence, dazzling virtuosity and
an edgy improvisational electricity. He respected Ellington, but, importantly, didn’t
speak for Ellington.

Ellington’s three “Sacred Concerts,” his final and most Bachian testament, were 
created in cathedrals between 1965 and his death nine years later. At Disney, a 
host of young Black singers well versed in R&B, gospel and other vocal styles brought
a necessary now-ness to a sampling of eight numbers from these concerts. In so doing,
they held up a mirror to us, our wars, our greed and our continued categorization.

Placed alongside the earlier 1940s concert suites and what Ellington called “tone
parallels,” these “Sacred Concerts” complete Ellington’s grand spiritual and social
vision of America and race. He never lost his awareness of America’s wrongs; he 
never lost his optimism and love; he never lost his swing.

I bought a dollar Hollywood Bowl ticket for the 1966 Ellington performance of “New
World A-Comin’” and felt like I was witnessing history in the making. Two years 
later, as a music student at UC Berkeley, I caught the “Second Sacred Concert” at
Grace Cathedral in San Francisco but didn’t know what to make of its mix of pirituality
and sentimentality, which Ellington insisted was the most important statement he’d
ever made.

It took me many years to begin to grapple with the unfathomable complexity of freedom
as Ellington studied it, witnessed it and lived it. He asked the questions about
race, commercialism and conflict we asked then and we ask again adamantly today.

The L.A. Phil provided an arresting inkling of Ellington’s answers. But for all 
the scholarship, all the recordings, all the biographies and analyses of his music,
all the covers of his tunes, we hardly knew him — and still don’t.

![A black-and-white photo of Duke Ellington laughing with a woman sitting on a piano
bench ](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/4aaffb9/2147483647/strip/
true/crop/2968x2118+0+0/resize/840x599!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-
times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fe4%2Fd0%2F087e24474b6ca2374ddcf3a21155%2Fla-
ca-duke-ellington-00261.JPG)

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