Duke Ellington did not much care for the word “jazz.” Over the course of a career as a composer, bandleader, and pianist that stretched from the early 1920s until his death in 1974, among his various objections to the term were that it implied an untrained, uncivilized, or “lowbrow” musicianship, that it captured only a narrow range of a much wider field of “moods” he sought to evoke in his compositions, and, more fancifully, that its origins lay in an expression for flushing a toilet.Footnote 1 The words through which he preferred to characterize his music, however, strike a somewhat discordant tone against much of the voluminous scholarship on Ellington.
That scholarship has frequently accentuated Ellington's “integrationist” philosophy and his rejection of black “separatism”: the “concept of integration” was one he “practiced in every facet of his life”; “integration” was “central” to such Ellington compositions as Such Sweet Thunder (1957); the “patriotic tone” Ellington struck when introducing My People (1963) “should be sufficient to indicate Ellington's distance from the separatism of the burgeoning Black Power movement.”Footnote 2 Rarely do these accounts dwell on the meanings that “integration” held for Ellington, or within American racial discourse more broadly, yet the picture they render struggles to accommodate the intensity of the connections he drew between his music and his blackness. Commenting on Ellington's descriptions of his work during the 1930s and 1940s—as “essentially Negro music,” “authentic Negro music,” and “unadulterated American Negro music”—an important study contends that from such phrases it might appear “as if he were claiming an impossible racial purity for his music,” and that they convey a “racial pride” that “at times may have run contrary to his integrationist ideals.” Ellington's “recourse” to such language, the study explains, signals that he was “trapped” by his determination to refute racist assumptions that would credit his music's sophistication to “white elements” or European influences.Footnote 3 Against this impression of self-contradiction, I hope to reveal a more coherent Ellingtonian vision of race and nation.
Far from being unique to the literature on Ellington, the binary logic that pits a seldom-defined “integrationism” against an equally nebulous “separatism” has left its mark on decades of scholarship on African American thinkers, artists, and activists, and in recent years has been the subject of rising critique. As Nikhil Singh has memorably argued, such logic embodies the tendency of US liberal nationalism to elevate, as “integrationist,” that which is seen as upholding the primacy of a unitary American nationhood and its emancipatory potential, and to array against this (or consign to the margins), as “separatist” or “blackist,” expressions of black autonomy and cultural particularity.Footnote 4 Recovering the multiplicity and subtlety of the ways in which African Americans have lived and theorized the nexus of race and nation entails the careful work of historicizing “integration” and “separation” as contested, malleable concepts within US racial discourse—work that is only now gathering pace.Footnote 5 However, it also demands that we look beyond these terms and the tendency to subsume within them the breadth and intricacy of twentieth-century African American social and political ideas.
Ellington's understanding of the relationship between black peoplehood and US nationhood is instructive here, as it was relayed not through such familiar terminology, but through distinctive words, sounds, and movements that evoked particular notions of space and place.Footnote 6 Spatial constructs and practices, I argue, offer historians vital entry points through which to access the nuance and variety of African American ideas of race and nation. Ernest Allen Jr has attributed the “ambiguity and confusion” engendered by the “integration vs. separation frame” to the way these terms “reduce complex social relations to the language of spatial metaphor.”Footnote 7 To the contrary, I see the persistent use of these terms as expressive (sometimes unwittingly so) of the inherently spatial nature of social relations and social thought, in all their complexity. Mindful of Katherine McKittrick's warning against the “terribly seductive” notion “that space and place are merely containers for human complexities and social relations,” I suggest that we need to attend more closely to the spatial imaginaries through which the conjuncture of race and nation has been envisioned and communicated. As an array of recent works, including in the field of “black geographies,” has detailed, black diasporic life was born of spatial rupture, has been constrained and fortified by place-making, and is generative of vivid mappings and geographical yearnings. “Black matters,” McKittrick insists, “are spatial matters.”Footnote 8 I wish to argue that by comprehending spatial practices, including physical and discursive place-making, we restore the vivid particularity that is often concealed behind potentially homogenizing abstractions such as “integrationism.”Footnote 9
Ellington's vision of race and nation was embodied in his music, but was perhaps articulated most succinctly in response to a journalist who, in 1941, asked him to explain the “dissonance” within his compositions. “That's the Negro's way of life,” Ellington replied. “Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part.”Footnote 10 This spatial schema was both Ellington's metaphorical expression of the relationship of blackness to Americanness and, more literally, his idealization of a (possible) American social geography and the place of black people within it.
The unmistakable centrality of Harlem within Ellington's musical imagination and public discourse over successive decades can only be understood as rooted in his valuing of black apartness—a valuing that scholars have largely understated or trivialized, owing to its supposed incompatibility with Ellington's “integrationism.” Yet black people were also, for Ellington, “an integral part” of America. In this article, I bring to light the techniques of discursive place-making and broader spatial practices through which Ellington undertook an ongoing performance of Harlem that became the principal means of explicating his social vision of simultaneous partness and apartness. In doing so, I highlight ways in which that vision intersects with, and remains distinct from, a number of major currents in African American thought, from the competing tendencies within the interwar Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance to the traditionalist African American cultural criticism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The first section of what follows establishes key aspects of the historical and intellectual context within which Ellington's understanding of race and nation took shape, and foregrounds his musical and rhetorical glorification of Harlem as a black place. This glorification was a precondition for the type of cultural pluralist politics of recognition and inclusion that I call incorporation. If Harlem had long been legally incorporated into New York City, Ellington sought a more meaningful incorporation of the neighborhood, and “the Negro,” into the physical, cultural, and imaginative spaces of the city and US nation, while nonetheless sustaining Harlem's apartness. The second section reconstructs the spatial practices—which I call interpolation—through which Ellington sought to convey and enact this vision. If the word “incorporation” carries a necessary reminder of the power of market- and US-national appropriation of black culture, I intend “interpolation” to convey a countervailing sense of the agency and creativity that have been manifest in black projects of claiming, and transforming, “America.”Footnote 11
Such an approach holds that concepts and practices of space and place allow us to recuperate social visions at their most graphic, embodied, noisy, and concrete, restoring the specificity that abstractions such as “integration” can easily drown out. “Integration” has, indeed, proved a slippery term, often used in ways that elide distinct aims or ideals that have not always been held in combination, ranging from statutory desegregation of locales and institutions to cultural assimilation and “biological amalgamation.”Footnote 12 Yet the semantic appeal of “integration” through much of the twentieth century and beyond surely rests on its insinuation of the common spatial factor underlying most, if not all, of its varied objects: the aim of greater inclusion (however plastic this concept, in turn, may have been) within the US national domain, which distinguishes all such ideas from the emigrationisms and secessionisms that have disavowed the possibility of black flourishing within the US national context.Footnote 13 As thinly as the term “integration” itself specifies the character of Ellington's thought, then, his vision of incorporation undoubtedly forms a strand within a variegated intellectual history of integrationism, so defined—and one that resists any opposition between inclusion and apartness.
Ellington's social vision and spatial practice of the 1930s and early 1940s have had divergent afterlives, as perhaps befits a thinker whose aesthetics and politics leaned across familiar ideological demarcations. His vision of incorporation during those years possessed a proletarian hue that complemented the Popular Front's promotion of a more expansive, egalitarian American patriotism. As will be seen, however, incorporation later proved adaptable to less progressive iterations of US nationalism, ranging from Ellington's own increasingly strident American exceptionalism during the early Cold War period to the manner of his veneration by the figureheads of a black “neoconservatism” that gained prominence toward the end of the twentieth century. By contrast, an array of African American cultural expressions in recent decades have revealed a more radical potential within Ellington's spatial practice of interpolation, when the latter is enlisted to operate beyond incorporation's limits, and limitations, as a US-nationalist politics of inclusion.Footnote 14
“From the life of Harlem”
Harlem's extraordinary, sustained prominence within Ellington's music and his wider discourse and self-fashioning sprang from something deeper than the “vogue” for the neighborhood, as a nightlife destination and trope of racial exoticism, that took hold among segments of white America during the 1920s—as commercially savvy as Ellington and his manager, Irving Mills, undoubtedly were.Footnote 15 Though he exaggerated when he claimed in 1933 that “every one of my song titles is taken from, and naturally primarily from, the life of Harlem,” his abundant use of Harlem imagery is inescapable.Footnote 16 Reeling off titles such as “Harlem Speaks,” “Harlem Flat Blues,” “Drop Me Off at Harlem,” “Echoes of Harlem,” “Uptown Downbeat,” and “I'm Slappin’ Seventh Avenue,” Ellington's first biographer, Barry Ulanov, wrote that the neighborhood was a long-standing “obsession with Duke.”Footnote 17 Graham Lock, John Howland, and Kimberley Hannon Teal have addressed Harlem's importance as a symbolic resource within Ellington's project of vindicating African American life and history, and the impact of the neighborhood's musical and entertainment cultures on his artistic imagination.Footnote 18
Building on such insights, I wish to demonstrate that Ellington's renderings of Harlem as a place, together with the spatial practices by which he carried Harlem to strategically and symbolically significant locations, institutions, and media, comprise an ongoing performance of his theorization of the race–nation nexus. Indeed, Ellington was one among a litany of twentieth-century black artists and intellectuals—Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Gil Scott Heron, Faith Ringgold, to name only a few—who articulated the realities and possibilities of being black and American through evocations of Harlem.Footnote 19 For decades after its emergence in the 1920s as the world's largest, most cosmopolitan black urban community, this variously styled “Black Metropolis” and “Mecca of the New Negro,” more than any other place, carried the weight of symbolizing the prospects of black existence in the United States.Footnote 20
The journalist to whom Ellington spoke of African Americans in 1941 as “something apart, yet an integral part,” was John Pittman, an African American communist. Pittman enthusiastically likened Ellington's statement to the concept of a “nation within a nation” underlying the Comintern's 1928 assertion of African Americans’ right to self-determination in the southern “Black Belt.”Footnote 21 This right of territorial sovereignty was not one Ellington espoused, and while he participated energetically in the cultural currents of the Popular Front, at no time was Ellington a communist.Footnote 22 The phrase “nation within a nation,” though, has a longer, more varied history in black political thought. Martin Delany had used it in advocating black emigration in the 1850s, comparing African Americans to “the Poles in Russia, the Hungarians in Austria”—subordinated peoples he regarded as living amid wholly separate nationalities.Footnote 23 By contrast, Booker T. Washington in 1899 described African Americans as “almost a nation within a nation” in arguing for continued black residence in the South. Washington appealed to a vision of rights-bearing black US citizens, while voicing no objection to emerging Jim Crow segregation.Footnote 24 Decades later, in 1966, the demand for “black self-government” in black-majority cities by the radical intellectuals Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs was, in part, a revision of the communist “Black Belt” thesis.Footnote 25
Ellington's conception differs from each of these positions. Like Washington, he envisioned a dual national belonging that entailed a sustained, autonomous black peoplehood alongside faith in the promise of equal black participation in US national life. However, if Washington's “nation within a nation” expressed acquiescence to segregation, Ellington's needs to be understood in the context of a broader rethinking of US nationhood during the early decades of the twentieth century. As George Hutchinson has shown, black intellectuals of the interwar Harlem Renaissance, as well as liberal and radical white thinkers, worked “to expand the notion of ‘the people’ who compose the American national community.” Against white supremacism and cultural Anglo-Saxonism—and the scant recognition of African Americans within the pluralist vistas of John Dewey, Horace Kallen, and Randolph Bourne—the likes of Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jessie Fauset, and J. A. Rogers promoted black cultural expression as central to their own pluralist articulations of Americanism.Footnote 26 Yet African American cultural pluralism was itself a contested terrain. The literary figures on whom Hutchinson focuses mostly advocated cultivation of black arts and letters as a step toward interracial understanding, and thence a deeply blended US national culture forged through reciprocal assimilation—and, in some cases, interracial “amalgamation.”Footnote 27 Ellington's vision of incorporation, I argue, entailed a markedly “harder” cultural pluralism that infused his characterization of “authentic Negro music” and his celebration of Harlem as an intensely, autonomously, and permanently black place.Footnote 28
“Nation within a nation” usefully captures the depth of Ellington's commitment to an enduring black peoplehood and culture while simultaneously registering his American patriotism, which was evident throughout his career and became especially voluble during World War II and the early Cold War. The phrase highlights the vividly spatial manner in which Ellington imagined the relationship between “Negro” and “American” peoples, a relationship he repeatedly described through his evocations of Harlem and inscribed through the movements of his band. Yet if “within” might suggest neat containment, a more ambiguous juxtaposition is signified by the rhetorical equivalence of “nation” and “nation”—an ambiguity that echoes Ellington's situating of black Americans as both “part” and “apart,” and summons the recurrent if unstable presence of Africa and its diaspora in Ellington's imaginary.Footnote 29 A distinct place for black people at the heart of the city that epitomized American modernity, Harlem located, and grounded, his vision of African Americans as “something apart, yet an integral part.”
At the turn of the twentieth century, Du Bois had famously described an agonized, destructive African American “double-consciousness”: “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”Footnote 30 Ellington, though incensed by white supremacy, heard the “dissonance” of African American subjectivity as something less tortured and internally conflicted. He contributed to a vocabulary that would resound, later in the century, in the black-and-American patriotism of the writers Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, two Ellington admirers who would also explore what Ellison called the “internality” of black American life through depictions of Harlem.Footnote 31
In the early stages of his musical career, however, Ellington had been strongly associated with another place that loomed large in the geography of African American life. For several years after arriving in New York in 1923, the musicians who formed the nucleus of what would soon be the ensemble most closely associated with Harlem were known as the Washingtonians. Early in 1924, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, their pianist, became leader of the small band, which included saxophonist Otto Hardwick, trumpeter Arthur Whetsol, and drummer Sonny Greer. Born in 1899 into the lower fringes of Washington, DC's race-proud black elite, Ellington had witnessed the erosion of the capital's status as the “undisputed center of American Negro civilization.”Footnote 32 Federal employment of African Americans plummeted during Woodrow Wilson's presidency, and segregation hardened.Footnote 33 Harlem, meanwhile, latterly an affluent white neighborhood, rapidly emerged in the 1920s as the new fulcrum and symbol of African American professional, political, intellectual, and cultural life.Footnote 34 Moreover, Harlem was the crucible of New York's vigorous “stride” piano style, which was imbuing jazz with a new air of urbane virtuosity. Following their idols Willie “the Lion” Smith and James P. Johnson from nightclubs to tenement parties, the Washingtonians reveled in the neighborhood's fertile musical culture.Footnote 35 Ellington would tell Carter Harman, a journalist who amassed twenty hours of recorded conversations with Ellington in 1956 and 1964, that Harlem had possessed “a musical language of its own” that seemed “totally independent.”Footnote 36
In the mid-1920s, Ellington's band established themselves as innovative practitioners of the bluesy, propulsive “hot” jazz that commanded great popularity uptown and downtown. In December 1927 they began a residency at the uptown Cotton Club that would run through to February 1931 and propel Ellington, and his association with Harlem, to international renown.Footnote 37 Lavish, pricey, mob-owned, and operating an almost exclusively whites-only admissions policy, this was the archetypal nightlife destination of the 1920s “Negro vogue.” Black dancers, including the club's notoriously light-skinned and minimally clad “chorus girls,” offered up primitivist fantasias amid antebellum plantation décor, accompanied by Ellington's (now ten-piece) ensemble.Footnote 38 Through song titles such as “Jungle Nights in Harlem,” Ellington and his manager, Irving Mills, rhetorically linked the music to these stage performances and permitted patrons to hear the growling, plunger-muted sounds brought forth by trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams as animalistic cries from the African (or urban American) jungle.Footnote 39 For all its constraints, Ellington not only used the Cotton Club as a springboard to fame but developed his compositional style in the process. While his “jungle” marketing would be short-lived, it licensed Ellington to experiment with the eerie, dissonant harmonies and “speaking” brass sonorities that would long characterize his orchestral palette.Footnote 40
Still, Ellington's ambitions exceeded the cabaret scene. Having left the Cotton Club, Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra toured the US and Europe, appeared in Hollywood films, and from the mid-1930s were one of the most critically exalted and commercially successful bands of the “swing era,” as jazz-inflected (to varying degrees) dance music became the leading American musical entertainment of the later Depression years.Footnote 41 Ellington's first published article, appearing in the British magazine Rhythm in 1931, had addressed his grand ambitions as a composer and frustration with the generic constraints (“only thirty-two bars,” and “a strict tempo”) of popular dance music. Proud of the “part my race is playing in the artistic life of the world,” he elaborated:
To-day we are an important and intrinsic part of the population of the great United States of America. In Harlem we have what is practically our own city; we have our own newspapers and social services, and although not segregated, we have almost achieved our own civilisation. The history of my people is one of great achievements over fearful odds; it is a history of a people hindered, handicapped and often sorely oppressed, and what is being done by Countee Cullen and others in literature is overdue in our music.
I am therefore now engaged on a rhapsody unhampered by any musical form in which I intend to portray the experiences of the coloured races in America in the syncopated idiom. This composition will consist of four or five movements, and I am putting all I have learned into it in the hope that I shall have achieved something really worth while in the literature of music, and that an authentic record of my race written by a member of it shall be placed on record.Footnote 42
In departing the Cotton Club, embracing wider geographic and artistic horizons, and embarking on a project of racial vindication, Ellington might well have left behind the imagery of Harlem, which by now was so bound up with the primitivism the club traded in. Instead, his article illustrates how central Harlem was to Ellington's visualization and expression of the ideals that would animate the new phase of his career. The early 1930s have often been identified as the moment the Harlem Renaissance died, as the hope, and patronage, that had fueled this profusion of black arts and letters during the preceding decade dissipated amid the Depression and an increasingly class-oriented politics.Footnote 43 Yet Ellington's article exhibits a key Renaissance trait (invoked through “Countee Cullen and others”) that would remain fundamental to his work for at least another two decades: the use of Harlem itself as an emblem of black yearnings, strivings, and accomplishments.Footnote 44 Glorifying Harlem was crucial to Ellington's pursuit of incorporation—his vision of an honored place for black peoplehood within the collective life and consciousness of the American nation. Doing so, however, would require an increasingly fraught effort amid proliferating images of Harlem that belied the black neighborhood's early promise.
Though divergent representations of Harlem constituted an important intra-Renaissance battleground, Ellington's tribute to “practically our own city”—where a distinctive black “civilisation” was arising as an “important and intrinsic part” of US society—broadly echoes the cultural-pluralist optimism of prominent 1920s Renaissance figures. Alain Locke had heralded Harlem as an emergent “race capital” engendered by a “tide” of southern and Caribbean migration, and as the domain of a “New Negro” intent on “group expression and self-determination,” who “lays aside the status of a beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization.”Footnote 45 Moreover, Ellington's description of Harlem as “not segregated”—truthful only on the narrowest definition—chimes with Locke's and James Weldon Johnson's accounts of black Harlem's formation and institutional life as primarily self-willed, self-enacted achievements.Footnote 46
This mode of racial vindication became ever more precarious during the 1930s and 1940s, as segregation's force and consequences in Harlem burst violently into view. Following Harlem's uprising of March 1935, when rumors concerning (frequently real) police brutality set off attacks on white-owned businesses, Locke himself conceded that Harlem was in reality a “Ghetto” and “an over-expensive, disease- and crime-ridden slum.”Footnote 47 Ellington's vision of black autonomy within “practically our own city” was undercut by the neighborhood's future congressman, Adam Clayton Powell Jr, whose newspaper column offered Ellington's own career as evidence of “musical sharecropping” in Harlem: “the Duke” was “owned body and soul by Massa Irving Mills,” who was “rumored” to have “pocketed $90,000 in 1934 alone.”Footnote 48
Ellington's Harlem imagery, and the vision of incorporation that rested on it, would be substantially at odds with a crescendo of bleak, naturalistic portrayals spurred by Harlem's uprisings of 1935 and 1943. In novels such as Carl Offord's White Face (1943) and Ann Petry's The Street (1946), the New York Photo League's “Harlem Document” project (1936–9), and official and journalistic reports on the uprisings, Harlem spelled acute alienation, deprivation, and social distress.Footnote 49 The neighborhood was coming to symbolize the northern, urban variants of segregation—the iconic American “ghetto,” a term connoting isolation and stigma rather than the dignified apartness (and respected partness) that incorporation entailed.Footnote 50 As will be seen, in the early 1940s Ellington privately penned his own anguished response to Harlem's oppression. Yet publicly he continued, mostly, to evoke the neighborhood as the epitome of black communal flourishing rather than indict white supremacy by amplifying Harlem's distress.
Buoyant, hard-swinging pieces like Ellington's “Drop Me Off at Harlem” (1933) and his collaborator Billy Strayhorn's “Take the ‘A’ Train” (1941) reprised the image of Harlem as a site of expectant arrival—the “Mecca of the New Negro”—that had run through much Harlem Renaissance discourse.Footnote 51 “‘A’ Train,” with lyrics inspired by directions Ellington had given Strayhorn to his apartment in Harlem's most prestigious enclave, Sugar Hill, would feature as the band's theme song for the remainder of Ellington's career.Footnote 52 In countless renditions at the top of a program, featuring vocalists such as Betty Roché, “‘A’ Train” implicitly cast the ensuing Ellington Orchestra performance—in a dance hall, concert hall, or radio broadcast; in New York, Biloxi, or Damascus—as a sonic journey to Ellington's Harlem.Footnote 53
Indeed, while the titles of his thousands of compositions invoke myriad places, people, moods, and moments, Ellington's most extensive, luminous programmatic descriptions almost invariably concern Harlem.Footnote 54 The romance and exuberance with which he persisted in conjuring the neighborhood are evident in his remarks about “Harlem Air-Shaft” (1940), an acclaimed instrumental piece that, while geared to a three-minute, 78-rpm record side and danceable tempo, exhibits the adventurousness he was simultaneously applying to longer, concert-oriented compositions. A New Yorker profile in 1944 quoted Ellington's description:
You get the full essence of Harlem in an air shaft. You hear fights, you smell dinner, you hear people making love. You hear intimate gossip floating down. You hear the radio. An air shaft is one great big loudspeaker. You see your neighbors’ laundry. You hear the janitor's dogs. The man upstairs’ aerial falls down and breaks your window. You smell coffee. A wonderful thing, that smell. An air shaft has got every contrast … I tried to put all that in “Harlem Air Shaft.”Footnote 55
Glorifying Harlem meant, for Ellington, reveling in the neighborhood's variety, richness, and clamor as a panoramic setting of black urban modernity. In this sense, incorporation resisted both primitivism and the emerging “ghetto” discourse. No less importantly, as will be seen, it refused any narrow recourse to the politics of respectability that deemed images of working-class tenement life inimical to the pursuit of black rights.
Ellington's verbal portrait of an often merry and sensuous—if rambunctious, sometimes fractious—tenement life, and the evident fondness with which he sketched it, certainly accord with the high-spirited tone of “Harlem Air-Shaft” itself. The piece fairly bounces through successive brass and reed riffs, finding room for bright, declarative trumpet interjections by Cootie Williams and graceful, swooping solo work by clarinetist Barney Bigard before a final chorus combines the strains in raucous polyphony. All this sounds a world away from the anxiety and threat pervading the naturalist black urban literature of the 1940s. In Ann Petry's The Street, the ominous “wind sighing in the airshaft” breaches the apartment walls within which Lutie Johnson tries to shield her young son from Harlem's menacing presences.Footnote 56 Even in 1925, at the zenith of hopes for Harlem, Rudolph Fisher had employed an air-shaft—a vertical “sewer of sounds and smells”—to signify the noxious effects of Harlem's segregation and overcrowding.Footnote 57
Ellington thus cleaved to the Harlem-centered strategy of cultural vindication devised at the height of the Renaissance by Locke, Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson, even years after Locke had abandoned it. Yet for all his celebrated elegance and decorum, and elite upbringing, “the Duke” never restricted himself to the bourgeois respectability politics of “uplift” that had shaped the racial vindicationism of prominent New Negroes such as Locke, Du Bois, Fauset, and Cullen.Footnote 58 While Ellington admired Cullen's poetic accomplishments, Cullen, a master of sonnet form, had in 1928 dismissed Langston Hughes's jazz-inspired poems, and warned black artists away from spaces of black life that compromised bourgeois respectability: “Every phase of Negro life should not be the white man's concern. The parlor should be large enough for his entertainment and instruction.”Footnote 59 What Cullen would make of Ellington plunging his interracial audience amid the sounds and smells of a Harlem tenement's air-shaft can readily be inferred. Yet for Ellington, a sympathetic rendering of working-class black urban life was indispensable to black America's incorporation.
Harlem also remained vital to Ellington as both a realization and a spatial metaphor of black autonomy. Though his 1931 article had expressed pride in “my race” as “an important and intrinsic part” of the “great” United States, Ellington's emphasis had been on apartness—the separate place (“practically our own city”) and parallel institutions (“our own newspapers and social services”) through which “we have almost achieved our own civilisation.”Footnote 60 Harlem's telos, here, recalls Horace Kallen's (albeit Eurocentric) hard pluralist ideal of an American democracy in which each “ethnic” group would “attain the cultural perfection that is proper to its kind.”Footnote 61 This pronounced cultural separatism, tinged with essentialism, emerges too in Ellington's characterizations of his music, which have been bracketed as deviations from his “integrationist” philosophy: “Naturally my own race is closest to my heart; and it is in the musical idiom of that race that I can find my most natural expression”; “The only way to play Negro music is to be a Negro.”Footnote 62 A significant, but neglected, implication of such statements is that just as Ellington envisioned Harlem as a self-willed black community, so the blackness of his band's personnel was more than the by-product of a segregated entertainment industry. Indeed, their diverse African American and Caribbean origins made the Ellington Orchestra a microcosm of Harlem's cosmopolitan blackness.Footnote 63
The intrinsic, permanent value of black autonomy conveyed by Ellington's statements contrasts with the softer or more strategic pluralisms of leading New Negro thinkers. Locke had stressed that the cultural “racialism of the Negro” entailed “no limitation or reservation with respect to American life,” and Ellington would have concurred. But Locke elaborated that such racialism “is only a constructive effort to build the obstructions in the stream of his progress into an efficient dam of social energy and power,” thereby signaling that black communalism and cultural particularism were “only” rational adjustments to exclusion, rather than—as for Ellington—“natural,” intrinsically beneficial impulses that could help fashion an ideal pluralist order.Footnote 64 Du Bois, meanwhile, despairing of interracial cooperation by the mid-1930s, adopted a version of the leftist “nation-within-a-nation” thesis. Yet unlike Ellington's, Du Bois's advocacy of an autonomous black public sphere was grounded in reluctant, strategic calculation. For Du Bois, who famously had decried the “veil” of race, African Americans had been “confined by an unyielding public opinion to a Negro world.” In 1936, he recorded
the degree to which we form today a nation within a nation. Most of us are in separate churches and separate schools; we live largely in separate parts of the city and country districts; we marry almost entirely within our own group and have our own social activities; we get at least part of our news from our own newspapers and attend our own theaters and entertainments, even if white men run them.Footnote 65
These lines uncannily retrace Ellington's depiction of Harlem as “practically our own city.” Yet Ellington's bid for incorporation of African Americans into US nationhood through recognition of a valued black apartness led him to celebrate the parallel institutions and “civilisation” emerging in Harlem, and downplay the causal force of segregation. Du Bois, instead, counseled the strategic necessity of seizing command of the separate world engendered by segregation and “run” by “white men.”
Symphonies in black
As the Ellington Orchestra consolidated its position at the forefront of American dance-band music during the 1930s, and Ellington continued to envision a grand composition that would be “an authentic record of my race,” his association with Harlem only deepened. Newspapers, black and white, dubbed him a “Harlemaestro.”Footnote 66 The band traversed the country, typically returning to New York for just a few weeks per year, but Ellington's marketing as “Harlem's Aristocrat of Jazz” ensured that Harlem always traveled with them.Footnote 67 Even as the Depression's impact, and periodic violence, tarnished Harlem's image, Ellington found inventive ways to evoke the neighborhood—as “Harlem Air-Shaft” illustrates—and entwine its name with his own. Performing week-long stints each year at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom and Apollo Theater, and benefits for Harlem charities, Ellington endeared himself to local people who had been barred from his Cotton Club performances.Footnote 68 “My home is in Harlem, and I expect it to remain there,” he declared in 1938.Footnote 69 His championing of Harlem as a place “apart” continued. Yet he was also intent on vindicating black life as an “integral part” of American life. To this end he would interpolate Harlem into other spaces, with interracial audiences in mind.
Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Ellington hinted at ideas for the major composition that eventually became his longest, most formally ambitious concert work, the forty-eight-minute Black, Brown and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America. Its January 1943 premiere, as the centerpiece of the Ellington Orchestra's debut performance at New York's exalted Carnegie Hall, would mark the most fervently anticipated moment of his long career and one of the most controversial. In the preceding years, Ellington variously referred to his work-in-progress as a “rhapsody,” “suite,” “symphony,” and even “opera,” but generally his remarks outlined a chronological and spatial sequence proceeding from “Africa” to the plantations of “Dixie,” and ultimately “home to Harlem.”Footnote 70 No less important than this programmatic geography was Ellington's spatial vision of the performance itself, as he conceived the work specifically for a concert-hall premiere.
Symphony in Black, a remarkable nine-minute film “short” released by Paramount in 1935, provides a manifesto for this musical and spatial agenda.Footnote 71 Featuring the Ellington Orchestra performing the imagined “world premiere” of a “symphony of Negro Moods,” the film illuminates how Ellington's objective of 1931—to relate African American experience through an extended composition—evolved and shaped his developing vision of Black, Brown and Beige as an act of interpolation.
The film proceeds, without dialogue, through four sequences corresponding to the movements of Ellington's notional symphony: “The Laborers,” “A Triangle,” “Hymn of Sorrow,” and “Harlem Rhythm.” Within each, shots of an enlarged Ellington Orchestra in tailcoats, performing the movements on a concert-hall stage, cut to scenes depicting aspects of black life that inspired this “symphony of Negro moods,” and shots of Ellington composing it in his homely studio. “The Laborers” signals an emerging left-realist impulse Ellington wrestled with as he aligned himself substantially with Popular Front aesthetics and politics—though such realism was often overshadowed by his more celebratory imagery.Footnote 72 Black workmen, stripped to undershirts, shovel coal into a furnace, their weary motions accentuated by thudding, drummed downbeats. Next, “A Triangle” opens with joyous, swinging music, as a couple dance the “Lindy Hop”—a style intimately associated with Harlem—in an apartment's cozy living room.Footnote 73 Later, on the street, the man is confronted by a spurned lover played by a young Billie Holiday, whom he pushes to the ground, and who sings a blues lament. The plaintive tone continues in “Hymn of Sorrow,” as an elderly preacher leads a mournful prayer. Ellington remarked publicly that this scene “concerns the death of a baby” and “the conditions” that caused it. This is scarcely evident in the film, likely owing to Paramount's intervention. Ellington further commented that “Hymn of Sorrow” was the film's “high spot” and “should have come last.”Footnote 74 Paramount seemingly reordered Ellington's progression to conclude with the rousing “Harlem Rhythm,” featuring cabaret dancers in a “Harlem Hot Spot.”
This alteration ostensibly diminished Ellington's social critique and bolstered Harlem's stereotyped association with sensual cabaret pleasures (liquor bottles and the serried legs of a female chorus line appear prominently). But the film's final moments cut back to the concert hall, where Ellington, at the piano, smiles with satisfaction at the orchestra arrayed beyond him. This ending accentuates the film's spatial schema and makes Ellington's artistic practice the film's true subject, by locating his inspiration (Harlem life), composition (studio), and performance (concert hall), and mapping his movements between them. Shots of the black musicians onstage repeatedly pan out to encompass the stalls and their occupants, many of them white. Here was Ellington's vision of incorporation, enacted by the interpolation of blackness into the central spaces of US national life and cultural consciousness. Film was itself a highly significant space within US public life into which to project pathbreaking images of black creativity and accomplishment.Footnote 75 Symphony in Black's added significance, though, lies in its systematic presentation of the spatial techniques Ellington would deploy in the real-world “premiere” of Black, Brown and Beige eight years later: sounds and stories of an autonomous black peoplehood (“almost … our own civilisation”) are drawn from the life of Harlem, mediated by Ellington's pen and orchestra, and finally received and honored within the concert hall, the spatial embodiment of musical worth and dignity within the elevated precincts of American culture.
That concert would be greeted as a major occasion in the wartime artistic life of New York City. After Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky conducted at its opening in 1891, midtown Manhattan's Carnegie Hall had become the United States’ most iconic classical music venue. Benny Goodman's swing band had performed there in 1938, and Ellington was reportedly “livid” to have been beaten to it by the white bandleader.Footnote 76 Nevertheless, the Ellington Orchestra's appearance on 23 January 1943 was “the first time a major black composer would present an evening of original music in New York's most prestigious concert hall.”Footnote 77 Goodman, Marian Anderson, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Sinatra, and Leopold Stokowski were among the capacity audience Hughes described as “almost half-and-half—half colored and half white.”Footnote 78
A benefit for Russian War Relief (though Ellington's onstage remarks focused more on the US war effort), the concert also honored the Ellington Orchestra's “Twentieth Anniversary.”Footnote 79 The program's first half, culminating in Black, Brown and Beige, appeared more specifically to commemorate twenty years of Ellington's association with New York and, above all, Harlem. Following a distinctively Ellingtonian “Star Spangled Banner” came “Black and Tan Fantasy,” first recorded in 1927.Footnote 80 The title referenced nightclubs, most famously in Harlem, that had catered to a racially mixed clientele at the height of the “Negro vogue.”Footnote 81 In commencing the evening's program by recalling the interracial encounters of 1920s New York, Ellington seemingly invited his audience to reflect on the distance between the white “slumming” of those years (“Oh, I met a million of those cats” seeking “this unusual experience. A form of slumming, something to look down on,” he would tell Carter Harman) and the alternative mode of interracial encounter embodied in the concert itself, which brought Harlem—a fuller, multifaceted Harlem—down to Carnegie Hall, at the geographic center of Manhattan and symbolic center of American art music, on Ellington's terms.Footnote 82
The printed program grouped “Black and Tan Fantasy” with “Rockin’ in Rhythm” (1931) and two other short compositions credited to Ellington's son, Mercer, as forming one of three segments within the concert's first half.Footnote 83 Between this opening segment and Black, Brown and Beige was a trio of musical “Portraits” of the actor and comedian Bert Williams, the tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and the singer Florence Mills. All three were famously associated with Harlem.Footnote 84 Indeed, the program notes mentioned Robinson's popular status as unofficial “Mayor of Harlem.”Footnote 85 Ellington's inclusion of these tributes takes on added significance in light of an article he had written for a black theater magazine in 1938, while recovering from a hernia operation. The view of midtown Manhattan's skyscrapers from his Wickersham Hospital window had “thrilled” Ellington. He had
spent some time comparing the marvelous sky-line to our race, likening the Chrysler tower, the Empire State building and other lofty structures to the lives of Bert Williams, Florence Mills and other immortals of the entertainment field … And it seemed to me, from where I was lying, that in addition to their great talent, the qualities which have made really great stars are those of simplicity, sincerity, and a rigid adherence to the traditions of our own people.Footnote 86
Ellington's words make plain the vividly spatial, and urban, character of his artistic, social, and racial imagination. Transmuting iconic features of New York's architectural topography into the towering figures of Williams and Mills, he conveyed patriotic reverence for the “marvelous sky-line” that emblematized American modernity while simultaneously blackening this archetypal American space by bringing Williams and Mills down from Harlem and memorializing them at the very center of Manhattan—much as the performance of his “Portraits” at Carnegie Hall would do five years later. Here again, in both cases, was a vision of incorporation, a spatial inclusion that achieved a blackening of the US national domain. This was integration not as racial amalgamation or even cultural syncretism, but as the interpolation of autonomous black expression (“rigid adherence to the traditions of our own people”) into the venerated, now interracial, spaces of US national life.
Black, Brown and Beige then clinched Harlem's induction into the sacral realm of American art music, before the concert's second half reverted to more familiar short-form Ellingtonia. More has been written about Black, Brown and Beige than any other Ellington composition, and much of this concerns its sweeping musical narration of black history.Footnote 87 While it is the final movement, “Beige,” that has its programmatic basis in Harlem, that movement's significance derives from its place within the larger “Tone Parallel.” Over the years, Ellington had characterized the historical trajectory of his work-in-progress in ways that assigned equal weight to Harlem—a slender portion of Manhattan that had been a major site of black settlement for scarcely three decades—as to “Africa” and “Dixie” as spatio-temporal markers of Black World-historical proportions.
The composition's vast historical and geographic scales have important antecedents in African American music and drama. Du Bois's pageant The Star of Ethiopia, which Ellington might have witnessed in Washington in 1915, had aimed to encompass “10,000 years of the Negro race.”Footnote 88 Meanwhile, “Africa–Dixie–Harlem” sequences had featured in interwar Harlem cabaret shows. Ellington applied the moral seriousness and historical vindicationism of the former to rework the formulas of the latter, which had typically evoked Africa and the South as clichéd foils for Harlem's modern spectacles.Footnote 89 Through musical segments that he briefly described in remarks before each movement—including “Work Song,” the spiritual “Come Sunday,” “West Indian Dance,” “Emancipation Celebration,” and “The Blues”—Ellington imparted to “Black” and “Brown” a density of diasporic historical references that countered commonplace denials of black history and civilization.Footnote 90
“Beige” assails the primitivist stereotypes that had overshadowed New Negro idealizations of Harlem as “practically our own city.” Indeed, Ellington grapples with his own Cotton Club years, which had involved accommodating to (albeit signifying on) many of those stereotypes. This emerges clearly from an undated typescript in his archive that furnishes detailed, verse-like narratives relating to the composition's movements. Scholars have differed over whether the document pre-dates or post-dates Ellington's completion of the score.Footnote 91 Yet Ellington mentioned his “annotations” to Harman, and asked, “Would you like to see what I wrote? In 1943? 1942 or 1943? This was before the music was written for Black, Brown and Beige.”Footnote 92
Typescript sections headed “Black” and “Brown” trace the journey of “Boola,” a transhistorical figure personifying black experience, from African and southern enslavement to Emancipation. “Beige,” however, brings a shift in voice, as third-person narration of Boola's story gives way and Ellington himself appears to speak to, and of, present-day Harlem:Footnote 93
“Hot Harlem” is exposed as myth, a cabaret confection of “shuffling heels” and the “primeval beat of the jungle” that is audible in the movement's frenetic, discordant opening.Footnote 94 Ellington's brief, halting onstage remarks about “Beige” at Carnegie Hall did not name Harlem (unlike the concert's program notes).Footnote 95 He did, however, explain its opening as invoking “the veneer that we chip off as we get closer and find that all these people who are making all this noise and responding to the tom-toms are only a few people making a living,” who often “don't have enough to eat.”Footnote 96 Ellington later told Harman that the Harlem cabaret “girl” doing the “squirming dance” was “not in the throes of passion. She was working to get that salary to take home and feed her baby.”Footnote 97 The typescript for “Beige” similarly strips away the cabaret's exotic “veneer” to reveal a site of labor, exploitation, and suffering:
While Ellington had recoiled from acknowledging segregation in his 1931 article, the typescript portrays a Harlem “shoved and / Shut off” by external forces.Footnote 98
Beyond demystifying the cabaret, Ellington's “Beige” typescript attacks the notion that its sensationalized pleasures represent the sum total of Harlem life:
A formulation he later reemployed, the insistence that Harlem had “more churches than cabarets” (and “more well-educated and ambitious Negroes than wastrels”) points to Ellington's liminal position between the Harlem Renaissance's two major, competing aesthetic and ideological tendencies, and, relatedly, his complex intraracial class politics.Footnote 100 Much of the New Negro elite, including Du Bois and Locke, had viewed jazz and the blues with skepticism or outright distaste, instead promoting the adaptation of black spirituals into scored-through concert music that would be grounded in—but would elevate to the status of “art”—a wholesome, sacred vernacular relatively free of the salacious connotations of urban, working-class, commercialized black secular music.Footnote 101 Shane Vogel has good reasons to identify Ellington with the opposing “cabaret school” writers, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Wallace Thurman. This countercurrent resisted the bourgeois, puritanical “uplift” morality espoused by the Harlem Renaissance establishment, and reveled in the cabaret and its music as spaces in which heterodox black subjectivities could emerge across sexual, class, and racial boundaries.Footnote 102 Yet the manner in which the post-Cotton Club Ellington sought to loosen Harlem's association with cabarets—in particular, the deeply religious Ellington's repeated emphasis on “churches”—complicates his cabaret school alignment, even indicating a degree of congruence with the uplift-oriented vindicationism of more socially conservative New Negroes.Footnote 103 Du Bois, in 1926, had ridiculed the presumption that “the black cabaret is Harlem,” venturing that the “average colored man in Harlem is an everyday laborer, attending church, lodge and movie and as conservative and conventional as ordinary working folk everywhere.”Footnote 104 Ellington's reworking of Harlem imagery in Symphony in Black and Black, Brown and Beige, while not renouncing the cabaret or its music, similarly brought sites of labor, spirituality, and domesticity into view.
As “Harlem's Aristocrat of Jazz,” Ellington traversed intra-Renaissance fault lines, though scholarship has variously assigned him to one side or the other.Footnote 105 His music was rooted in urban black vernacular idioms and, like the cabaret school writers, he gloried in the blues (vulgar, profane music, from uplift's perspective). Flouting Cullen's bourgeois “parlor” prescriptions, Ellington's incorporation of Harlem dignified its working-class tenements and the laboring bodies of its male and female workers. Langston Hughes, then, had plenty to applaud from his seat at Carnegie Hall. Yet Ellington also brought to jazz the aristocratic, polished demeanor, honed among the black Washingtonian elite, that had earned him the nickname “Duke” even in his teens. His glorification of Harlem exalted the bourgeois serenity and grandeur of Sugar Hill and “Strivers’ Row”—he later objected to portrayals of Harlem that ignored its “quiet people,” “the doctors, or the lawyers, the dentists, the nurses, the ministers” who lived “a very conservative life”—even as it embraced the air-shaft's din and the hectic pulse of Harlem's nightlife.Footnote 106 Moreover, his determination to secure for black music the cachet of “art”—and recognition by white Americans of its cultural worth within the concert hall, and through extended compositional forms—helps account for Alain Locke's enthusiastic presence in the Carnegie Hall audience.Footnote 107
This indeterminacy between cabaret and uplift aesthetics—and between uplift's elitist class politics and the proletarian sensibility evident in Symphony in Black—reverberates in the typescript and music for Black, Brown and Beige. Having portrayed a community of exploited laborers, now riddled with “dope,” “disease,” and “despair” (“And Harlem … / How'd you come to be / Permitted / In a land that's free??”), the typescript suddenly resuscitates Harlem's promise:
Correspondingly, the music moves from a mournful, ensemble-saxophone passage, through a brisker, slightly haughty waltz, and into a stately clarinet and saxophone theme in 4/4 time that Ellington named “Sugar Hill Penthouse.”Footnote 109 As the typescript reverts from “despair” to something recalling Ellington's optimism about Harlem back in 1931, so the music's allusion to Sugar Hill's refinement restores Harlem's idealization as a place of black accomplishment and dignity. The typescript's assurance that Harlem is again ready “to lead” revives the notion of Harlem as black vanguard, testifying to Ellington's enduring attachment to the Harlem-centered New Negro strategy of racial vindication.
Ellington never published his typescript, even though, stung by criticisms of Black, Brown and Beige's premiere, he complained that the history it paralleled was unfamiliar to many who had heard it.Footnote 110 Much of the disapproval targeted Ellington's approach to extended form, which was found wanting by reviewers who could only conceive of thematic development in Eurocentric, symphonic terms. The structure of this and other extended Ellington works was repeatedly derided as “fragmentary.” However, the rapidly shifting tempos and themes that such critics found “awkward, abrupt” or “isolated, unintegrated” relate closely to Ellington's subject matter.Footnote 111 Ralph Ellison once wrote that the artist Romare Bearden's “meaning is identical with his method,” his collage technique “itself eloquent of the sharp breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of Negro American history.”Footnote 112 Ellington's “Beige,” with its especially “loose, episodic” structure, can similarly be heard as a parallel to Harlem migrants’ telescoped encounters with urban modernity.Footnote 113 His “abrupt,” “unintegrated” forms, no less than his idealized Harlem, signified black particularity.
The concert as a whole received considerable praise, and annual Ellington Orchestra concerts at Carnegie Hall over the next five years were milestones in jazz's recognition as “art” music.Footnote 114 The criticisms of Black, Brown and Beige help explain why, after January 1943, Ellington never again performed the work in its entirety. Yet the value of his first Carnegie Hall concert as an act of interpolation struck Ellington as deeply significant. Reflecting on his career in 1952, Ellington highlighted that occasion, which had “enabled me to present my Tone Parallel to the history of the American Negro.” Especially significant was “the audience” at that and subsequent Carnegie Hall concerts: the “quality of the appreciation, the attentiveness of the entire crowd of 3,000 people to every note we played” was a “model” that “proved hard to duplicate.”Footnote 115 The gathering of this devoted interracial audience, at the heart of American musical and metropolitan life, to listen intently to Ellington's “record of my race” as performed by his black orchestra, was a vindication in itself. It had been important to Ellington that Carnegie Hall be transformed by the presence of his orchestra and its music, rather than the other way around. Shortly before its premiere, the journalist Helen Oakley reported Ellington insistently denying that Black, Brown and Beige was an attempt at “symphonic” or any other “accepted classic form.” Ellington remarked, “The things we use are purely Negroid—we want to stay in character … We desire to remain true to self.”Footnote 116 That self was also resolutely American. Ellington, whose son Mercer was serving in the US Army, concluded his prefatory remarks to “Beige” by observing that “as before, we of course find the black, brown and beige right in there for the red, white and blue.”Footnote 117
Ellington's increasingly emphatic patriotism had been evident two years earlier when, at the invitation of a Los Angeles church, he had delivered a commentary on the line “I, too, sing America” from a Langston Hughes poem of 1926.Footnote 118 More than any other artist, it was Hughes, younger than Ellington by just three years, whose use of Harlem to express the relationship of black peoplehood to American nationhood resonated with Ellington's over a period of decades. Though not intimate friends, Ellington and Hughes had spoken during the mid-1930s about collaborating, and did so in 1941 as contributors to Jump for Joy, a Los Angeles musical revue suffused with the ethos of the Popular Front, which lampooned the minstrel-derived stereotypes still pervasive in American entertainment.Footnote 119 “The Negro,” Ellington averred as he riffed on Hughes's poem, was the “shot in the arm” that had “kept America and its forgotten principles alive.”Footnote 120 Both men resisted the tide of naturalistic depictions of black life during the 1940s, and the longevity of their commitment to the trope of Harlem similarly marked them out among their generation of black artists.Footnote 121 The possibility of the neighborhood's revival as a frontier of black progress, which Ellington held out amid the melancholy of his “Beige” typescript, would also surface in 1951, in a more subdued register, in Hughes's poetic image of Harlem as a “dream deferred.” Moreover, Hughes's elaboration of that image as a “Dream within a dream” interpolates the black freedom struggle into the very cadences of US nationalist mythology, anticipating Martin Luther King Jr's most famous oration even as it recalls the distinctively Ellingtonian sense of “nation within a nation.”Footnote 122
Coda
How forcefully Ellington's interpolation of blackness in January 1943 challenged prevailing conceptions of the US cultural domain can be gauged from the title of the New York Times Magazine's feature, “The ‘Duke’ Invades Carnegie Hall.”Footnote 123 Over time, however, his vision of incorporation would prove politically pliable. As a discourse of national inclusion, incorporation chimed well with the strains of liberal and left patriotism that fashioned a more capacious, egalitarian US nationalism during the Popular Front period, from Franklin Roosevelt's celebration of the “richness” immigrants brought to American culture to Earl Browder's declaration that “Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century.”Footnote 124 Yet from the late 1940s, Ellington's increasing alignment with tenets of Cold War-era American exceptionalism, evident, for example, in his tributes to American “freedom of musical speech,” eased the way for his later adoption as an icon of a distinctly conservative brand of black cultural and social criticism that coalesced during the final two decades of the twentieth century.Footnote 125
An important step toward this mode of veneration was made by the novelists and essayists Ralph Ellison (1914–94) and Albert Murray (1916–2013), two long-term Harlem residents who, in their own ways, elaborated on Ellington's affirmative portrayals of the neighborhood as distinctively black and quintessentially American. For both, Ellington embodied a “heroic” American individualism that found its highest artistic expression in jazz.Footnote 126 At the hands of their devotee, the critic Stanley Crouch (1945–2020), who was schooled at Murray's informal “Harlem lyceum” during the late 1970s, such black-and-American patriotism and veneration of Ellington were given a sharply polemical edge and eventually assimilated into a triumphalist post-Cold War American nationalism.Footnote 127 A prominent exponent of what has been termed black “neoconservatism,” Crouch combined the idea that African American culture and freedom struggles were the historic core of American democratic life with a (viscerally patriarchal) declension narrative wherein music and morality had succumbed to creeping anarchy since the 1960s.Footnote 128 Together with his protégé Wynton Marsalis (born 1961), the feted trumpeter and influential director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Crouch has championed “traditional” musical and moral standards, along with recognition of the indispensability of African American culture to American exceptionalism. Into this project they have heavily enlisted the music and aura of Ellington, most conspicuously through their leading roles in shaping Ken Burns's nineteen-hour documentary series Jazz, which reached an estimated 23 million American television viewers in 2001.Footnote 129
The elements of Ellington's spatial practice of interpolation, meanwhile, have also proven supple in their adaptation to serve an eclectic range of political and aesthetic purposes. When Richard Nixon held a state banquet in Ellington's honor in 1969, Ralph Ellison reveled in Ellington's being accorded “the highest hospitality of the nation's First Family in its greatest house,” anticipating by forty years the tenor of much commentary that greeted the Obamas’ arrival at the White House.Footnote 130 Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton, which opened on Broadway in 2015, similarly interpolated blackness, and a wider racial diversity, into the recitation of the US nationalist and patriarchal narratives of the “Founding Fathers” and “First Family.”Footnote 131 However, while each of these examples echoes, to some degree, Ellington's deployment of his spatial practice in service of a US-national incorporation of blackness, others indicate a more radical potential within Ellingtonian interpolation, when decoupled, or at least loosened, from incorporation's constraints as a patriarchal US nationalist discourse of inclusion. Faith Ringgold's 1991 story-quilt picturing black women and girls dancing before the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and Serena Williams's joyful dance on Wimbledon's Centre Court in 2012 are two such instances.Footnote 132 The Carters’ music video Apeshit (2018), in its defiant exhibiting of black music, dance, and bodies within the Louvre's galleries, reprises Ringgold's ambush of the precincts and canons of “Western art.”Footnote 133 Each performance reverberates with Ellington's “desire to remain true to self” when his band had breached another space steeped in white self-regard. Yet they interpolate blackness not into the nation, as Ellington had done, but into a (by their very acts of insertion and interruption) decolonized, depatriarchalized, and deprovincialized conception of humanity.
The Carnegie Hall concert of January 1943 marked the high point of an artistic project in which Ellington had performed his conception of African Americans as “something apart, yet an integral part.” He had done so, above all, through his revision of Harlem's imagery, and through the sequence of movements by which he interpolated the neighborhood and its symbolism, and the epic of black history, into the physical and imaginative realms of US national life. Ellington had turned to Harlem at critical junctures in his career, and did so again in the immediate postwar years, most notably in composing A Tone Parallel to Harlem for performance at New York's Metropolitan Opera House in January 1951, and in including that fourteen-minute work in his first long-playing record, Ellington Uptown (1953).Footnote 134 The genesis of A Tone Parallel to Harlem, commissioned by Arturo Toscanini for an intended series of works by major composers on the theme of New York City, must have delighted Ellington.Footnote 135 The commission and Met premiere seemed to herald a newly canonical place for dignified treatments of Harlem at the center of New York's self-mythologizing as the great American metropolis and apex of national culture.
Yet Harlem, as this work became known, has a distinctly nostalgic, even elegiac, quality. After the caustic indictments of white supremacy in the “Beige” typescript, Harlem's music and Ellington's programmatic descriptions of it seemed to revert to the celebratory tenor of earlier works such as “Drop Me Off at Harlem” and “Harlem Air-Shaft.” From its opening notes, slowly growling the word “Harlem” through Cootie Williams's “speaking” trumpet, the piece evokes a grandeur more easily related to the hopes Ellington had invested in Harlem twenty years earlier, as “practically our own city,” than to the postwar neighborhood, scarred by neglect, decay, and depopulation, that was now losing many of its renowned artists and professionals to New York's outer boroughs and suburbs.Footnote 136 This nostalgia, effecting a certain slippage between past and present, is equally audible in Ellington's interviews with Harman in 1964. Here, Ellington likens Harlem to a musical “stroll” up Seventh Avenue, and comments, “Harlem has—ah, had—a language of its own, a musical language of its own. It wasn't like anybody else. Wasn't like any place else.”Footnote 137 The quickly self-corrected present tense hints at a wider temporal conflation that he knew was stretching thin. Elsewhere in the interviews, he spoke with frustration, sometimes bitterness, about the creeping loss of the apartness that had characterized Harlem and other black urban communities, and connected this to what he viewed as a loss of the communal solidarity and discipline necessary to the struggle for equality.Footnote 138 Ellington perhaps conceived Harlem and My People (1963) much as the poet Melvin Tolson conceived Harlem Gallery (1965), which Tolson called his attempt “to picture the Negro in America before he becomes the giant auk of the melting pot in the dawn of the twenty-second century.”Footnote 139
Harlem somewhat receded from the foreground of Ellington's compositional imaginary in the two decades prior to his death in 1974. International travel, including State Department-sponsored “goodwill tours,” consumed a growing proportion of his time, and infused new works such as Far East Suite (1966), Latin American Suite (1968), and Goutelas Suite (1971).Footnote 140 The strident Cold War Americanism that had studded his remarks since the late 1940s eased his (partial) acceptance of “jazz” as a name for what he now described as an “American music” of “freedom.”Footnote 141 And, as Harlem's image as the archetypal “ghetto” hardened, this variety of Americanism helped fill the gap left by his eclipsed vision of a proudly autonomous black neighborhood incorporated into, and honored by, New York City and the wider US nation. Alongside the regret about the loss of black apartness that laced his words to Harman in 1964 was a measure of acceptance and a determination to keep moving. In the 1920s, he had tried to convince fellow bandleader Fletcher Henderson “that we ought to call what we were doing ‘Negro music’,” he told another interviewer the following year. “But it's too late for that now,” he continued. “The music has become so integrated you can't tell one part from the other as far as color is concerned. Well, I don't have time to worry about it. I've got too much music on my mind.”Footnote 142
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Tom Arnold-Forster, Uta Balbier, Harvey Cohen, Rachel Farebrother, Andrew Fearnley, Daniel Geary, Brian Ward, Theo Williams, and the anonymous reviewers and editors of Modern Intellectual History for their valuable comments on versions of this article. I also thank the Department of History and Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King's College London for funding that supported my archival research.
Open access
