Black, Brown and Beige

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Black, Brown and Beige is an orchestral suite composed by Duke Ellington, composed in 1943 and revised several times (most recently in 1969). It is considered his most celebrated work and one of the milestones in jazz music . Rolling Stone magazine selected the album, released in 1958, in 2013 in its list The 100 Best Jazz Albums at number 77.

The piece

Black, Brown and Beige is a multi-part orchestral work that was written for a big band and lasted a good forty-five minutes in the version of the world premiere. Ellington has called it "a tone-parallel to the history of the American Negro" ("sounding parallel to the history of the American Negro").

The three movements are titled "Black", "Brown" and "Beige". In terms of its instrumentation and style, the work can be assigned to jazz, but is formally a suite , which is unusual for jazz .

Emergence

Duke Ellington began working on the music for Black, Brown and Beige in late 1942 . But he had already planned in the late 1930s to write a work that would deal with the history of the African American . The Smithsonian Institution's Duke Ellington Collection holds a 39-page script titled "Boola," which tells in verse the story of an African who arrives in the New World on a slave ship.

Ellington never completed this project he had started. But it was the source of inspiration for his large-format work Black, Brown and Beige . The titles of some parts of this work as well as the text in the part The Blues come from the Boola script.

Original structure of the suite (1943)

A. Black

1. Worksong
2. Come Sunday
3. Light

B. Brown

4. West Indian Dance
5. Come Sunday
6. The Blues

C. Beige

7. A View from Central Park
8. Cy Runs Rock Waltz
9. Interlude - Cy Runs Rock Waltz
10. Sugar Hill Penthouse
11. Finale

effect

Duke Ellington premiered the suite with his orchestra on January 23, 1943 at his first concert at Carnegie Hall in New York . It was previously advertised as Ellington's first symphony.

Black, Brown and Beige was a huge hit with audiences, but criticism was mixed. The journal Metronome emphasized that the suite deepened the possibilities of Ellington's band staff, supported Ellington's ambitions as a composer incredibly, with its wealth of beautiful melodies, the fresh, expressive arrangements for the wind instruments and its relentless rhythmic drive. Paul Bowles , then a critic of the Herald Tribune , accepted Ellington's claim that Black, Brown and Beige were art music , but came to the conclusion that the attempt to fuse the forms of jazz with art music had turned out "disappointing". Other critics, on the other hand, even denied that the performance by Ellington and his orchestra was a concert at all. Even John Hammond was of the opinion that Ellington "devastated" jazz. According to Ted Gioia , despite some shortcomings (such as too many tempo changes and melodies in the last part), the work is a milestone in Ellington's oeuvre.

The first performance in 1943 was not recorded by Ellington's record company RCA Victor at the time, as the length of the piece would have meant an effort that was then reserved for classical music. Carnegie Hall technicians had made a private recording, which was finally published in 1977. Although Black, Brown & Beige has been described as a masterpiece by some critics, Ellington may have been discouraged by negative reviews, so after two concerts in Boston and Cleveland he never performed the original suite in full again. However, he played individual parts of the various movements, such as “Work Song” or “Come Sunday”, in different combinations.

When Ellington appeared for the second time at Carnegie Hall in December 1944, he offered the piece in a version that was cut to a good half; only six parts were performed, which essentially came from the first two movements Black and Brown and were best worked through (Claudia Roth Pierpont suspects that the third part, beige , was still in the process of being created, as Ellington was here the night before the premiere; in beige Ellington had also expressed criticism of the conditions in today's Harlem .)

On the first record (RCA 2115524-2), the same selection could be heard in just 18 minutes; for the first time the piece “Come Sunday” was provided with text. In 1958 an album of the same name was released, in which six parts of the suite are interpreted by the Duke Ellington Orchestra and in addition a new, last part, 23rd Psalm ; the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson performed the vocal parts. The album, which later also contained two more pieces, Track 360 and Blues in Orbit , was released under the title Black, Brown and Beige .

It was published in sheet music in 1963 (the only one of Ellington's large-format works). In 1969, Ellington wrote a new final section for the seven-part suite, a variant of "Work Song", which ended with a closing quote from "Come Sunday".

Discographic notes

  • Duke Ellington - Carnegie Hall Concerts January 1943 ( Prestige Records )
  • Duke Ellington and His Orchestra - Black, Brown & Beige (The 1944-1946 Band Recordings) ( RCA Victor )
  • Duke Ellington - Carnegie Hall Concerts December 1944 (Prestige)
  • Duke Ellington and His Orchestra Featuring Mahalia Jackson - Black, Brown And Beige (Columbia, 1958)
  • Duke Ellington / American Composers Orchestra (conducted by) Maurice Peress : Black, Brown & Beige / Three Black Kings / New World A-Comin '/ Harlem (MusicMasters, 1989 / Nimbus Records, 2008)
  • Claude Bolling Black, Brown & Beige (Milan, 1993)

literature

  • Lisa Diane Barg: National Voices / Modernist Histories. Race, Performance and Remembrance in American Music, 1927-1943 Stony Brook / NY 2001 (Chapter "Race, Narrative and Nation in Duke Ellington's 'Black, Brown and Beige'", pp. 166-238)
  • George Burrows (2007): Black, Brown and Beige and the politics of Signifyin (g): Towards a critical understanding of Duke Ellington. Jazz research journal , 1: 45-71.
  • Harvey G. Cohen (2004): Duke Ellington and Black, Brown, and Beige: The Composer as Historian at Carnegie Hall. American Quarterly - 56 (4): 1003-1034.
  • Kevin Gaines (2000): Duke Ellington, Black, Brown, and Beige, and the cultural politics of race in Radano, Ronald Michael ed., Music and the racial imagination (Chicago, IL, USA: University of Chicago Press), 585– 602.
  • Wolfram Knauer (1990): Simulated improvisation in Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige. The black perspective in music , 18: 20–38.
  • Mark Tucker (Ed., 1993) The Duke Ellington Reader (New York: Oxford Univ. Press), 153–204 ISBN 0195054105 (this book contains early reviews as well as later analyzes of the work)
    Helen M. Oakley. Ellington to Offer 'Tone Parallel' repr. from Down Beat (January 15, 1943), 13. Preview of the concert.
    Howard Taubman. The 'Duke' Invades Carnegie Hall. repr. from New York Times Magazine (January 17, 1943), 10, 30. Preview of the concert.
    Program for the first Carnegie Hall Concert repr. from the Duke Ellington Collection, Smithsonian.
    Paul Bowles. Duke Ellington in Recital for Russian War Relief repr. from New York Herald-Tribune (January 25, 1943). Review of the concert.
    Mike Levin. Duke Fuses Classical and Jazz! repr. from Down Beat (February 15, 1943), 12-13. Review of the concert.
    John Hammond . Is the Duke Deserting Jazz? repr. from Jazz 1/8 (May 1943), 15, and Leonard Feather refutation in the same edition, pp. 14 & 20. Bob Thiele continued this debate with The Case of Jazz Music in Jazz 1/9 (July 1943), 19– 20th
    Robert D. Crowley. Black, Brown and Beige after 16 Years . Jazz, 2, 98-104 (1959).
    Brian Priestley & Alan Cohen . Black, Brown & Beige. Composer 51: 33-37 (Spring 1974); 52: 29-32 (Summer 1974); 53 (Winter 1974-75): 29-32.
  • Mark Tucker (Ed.) Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige . In: Black Music Research Journal 13/2 (Fall, 1993) ISSN  0276-3605 , with articles by:
    Mark Tucker, The genesis of Black, Brown and Beige .
    Andrew Homzy , Black, Brown and Beige in Duke Ellington's repertoire, 1943-1973 .
    Kurt Dietrich, The role of trombones in Black, Brown and Beige .
    Scott DeVeaux, Black, Brown and Beige and the critics .
    Sief Hoefsmit & Andrew Homzy, Chronology of Ellington's recordings and performances of Black, Brown and Beige .
    Maurice Peress, My life with Black, Brown and Beige .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Richard Wang : Black, Brown & Beige (1999)
  2. ↑ Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Jazz Albums . Retrieved November 16, 2016.
  3. ↑ Harvey G. Cohen Duke Ellington and Black, Brown, and Beige: The Composer as Historian at Carnegie Hall American Quarterly 56 (4), pp. 1003-1034
  4. ^ Theodore R. Hudson The Boola Script at the Smithsonian (PDF; 418 kB) In: Ellingtonia. Newsletter of the Duke Ellington Society 12 (3) 2004: 2-3
  5. ^ A b Claudia Roth Pierpont Black, Brown, and Beige in The New Yorker
  6. ↑ cit. n. Richard Wang Black, Brown & Beige (1999)
  7. ^ Ted Gioia The History of Jazz New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 177
  8. ↑ a b c Maurice Peress: Liner Notes for Black, Brown & Beige Nimbus Records 2008
  9. ↑ The CD version from 1999 also contains another version from the same recording sessions in February 1958, plus an a cappella version of Mahalia Jackson's Come Sunday .
  10. ↑ cf. Discogs