Duke Ellington's orchestral suite
to open Stanford Jazz Workshop
BY DIANE MANUEL
When Duke Ellington premiered Black, Brown and
Beige at Carnegie Hall in 1943, the 55-minute
orchestral suite didn't find an immediately appreciative
audience.
"It wasn't classical enough for classical
composers, and the jazz people thought it wasn't like the
jazz they were accustomed to," says Jim Nadel,
lecturer in jazz for the Music Department and director of
the Stanford Jazz Workshop. "I think it was just too
big a step for most people's ears at that time.
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"It's too bad because Ellington was on to
something with Black, Brown and Beige. There's so
much beauty in it, and it really is something everyone
should hear."
Ellington's epic masterpiece will find a new
generation of listeners on Saturday, June 28, when it is
performed at 3 and 8 p.m. at Dinkelspiel Auditorium.
Tickets are $25 and $20, available by calling 725-ARTS.
The concert work has its West Coast debut two days
earlier, at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco.
The full reconstruction of Ellington's extended work
for jazz big band will be performed by the Louie Bellson
Jazz Orchestra, conducted by Maurice Peress. Bellson
played drums in the Ellington band from 1951 to 1953 and
again in the 1960s for the Concerts of Sacred Music.
Peress, a conductor and musicologist at the Aaron Copland
School of Music, Queens College, City University of New
York, has worked with such diverse artists as Eileen
Farrell, Jessye Norman, Benny Goodman and the Modern Jazz
Quartet.
The concerts also feature blues vocalist Joe Williams,
who sang with the big bands of Coleman Hawkins and Lionel
Hampton in the 1940s and with Count Basie and his
Orchestra from 1954 to 1961.
The concerts at Dinkelspiel help to celebrate the
silver anniversary of the Stanford Jazz Workshop, a
nonprofit organization that has earned a reputation for
innovative excellence among professional jazz musicians
who clamor to be invited to campus as residential
teachers each summer. Proceeds from the concerts will
help to establish an endowed Duke Ellington Scholarship
Fund as part of the Jazz Workshop's youth outreach
programs.
Ellington had been composing a concert work for some
10 years when he was invited to appear at Carnegie Hall
for the first time. He premiered Black, Brown and
Beige at a concert given on behalf of Russian War
Relief on January 23, 1943, describing it as a
"tone-parallel to the history of the American
Negro."
But the audience and critics were not prepared for the
serious and extensive work, and it was not warmly
received at the time. Although Ellington repeated the
concert in Boston and Cleveland several days later, he
never played the work in its entirety after that. He did
record some sections, recycling such standards as Come
Sunday, and he performed the first movement, Black,
at the White House Festival of the Arts hosted by
President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson in 1965.
There he met conductor Maurice Peress.
"It was, for me, an epiphany," Peress has
written about that evening on the lawn of the White
House. "The audience would not let Duke and his
orchestra go."
Peress worked with Ellington to develop an orchestral
version of Black, Brown and Beige, titled the Symphonic
Suite, which was completed in 1970 and performed by
symphonies from Chicago, Kansas City and Austin under his
direction.
In 1989 Peress recreated the Ellington work in concert
in Carnegie Hall for jazz band. Three years later, Peress
and the Louie Bellson Jazz Orchestra recorded the fully
reconstructed Black, Brown and Beige for Music
Masters Records in anticipation of the 50th anniversary
of the original 1943 Carnegie Hall performance.
The symphonic work tells the story of a mythical
African named Boola through 300 years of history. It
begins with his enslavement, then traces his life in
America from colonial times through emancipation, to
Harlem and into World War II.
"I think one of the reasons why Ellington never
performed it after Carnegie Hall - and this is
speculation on my part - is that the story has a
message," Nadel says. "Ellington is saying that
African Americans have made a major contribution to this
country from its very beginnings.
"They've repeatedly been asked to come forward
and to die for their country, but never received equal
treatment in society. And I suspect that there were
racist elements in society at the time who thought,
'Here's an African American who's going to play Carnegie
Hall with this theme of the importance of African
American contributions to society,' and that was just too
much for people."
Nadel applied for a grant from the National Endowment
for the Arts in 1995 and received seed money last summer
to have Black, Brown and Beige performed at the
Jazz Workshop. As he has studied the score, his
appreciation for the dramatic shifts and modulations, as
well as changes in meter and tempo, has only deepened.
"This is a work of symphonic proportions,"
he adds. "Although Ellington was the master of two-
and three-minute forms because the 78 rpm records of that
period limited him, this is his most ambitious attempt
and all the elements of classical composition are
there."
The narrative poem that is the foundation of the work
and shows the color of life between the world wars is the
story of Ellington's life, Nadel says.
"So many times we think of composers sitting by a
piano in a calm, tranquil environment, working,"
Nadel adds. "But Ellington never had that luxury.
"The only way he could hear what he was writing
was to keep the orchestra working. So they were touring
constantly, and he had to write on buses and trains. He
never had time to just sit."
Nadel taught a course on Ellington's music in spring
quarter and has spent considerable time studying the
score and listening to the 1992 recording. For the
Dinkelspiel concerts, he will play second alto saxophone
with the 17-member Bellson band. Music lecturer Fred
Barry also will perform on trumpet.
"Maurice has been championing this work for many,
many years, but this is the first time he's going to have
the chance to perform it live," Nadel says of the
conductor.
Peress, he adds, will give a 30-minute talk about Black,
Brown and Beige immediately before each set. SR
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