Black Heroes Matter: John Lewis and Duke Ellington
When the great die young, they leave a legacy and a question: what if they had lived a full life?
When the great live long, the arc of human achievement shines brighter, as heroism beams beyond the realm of myth into actuality.
Over the weekend, the world received news of the death of Civil Rights pioneer and long-time legislator John Lewis. We honor his bravery, his courage in the face of vicious opposition, his willingness to put his body and life on the line to fight for justice while never losing sight of the humanity of his opponents.
We honor John Lewis for his abiding humility and ever-present faith in God and belief in the sacred principles of America. We honor John Lewis for leading, as a very young man, a group of marchers over the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965, taking blows and a beating so those of us who follow might have more opportunity to exercise our citizenship rights.
We give thanks for the elder John Lewis, who led a sit-in in Congress for the sake of gun legislation in this violent land. We are grateful that John Lewis was never afraid to make some noise, even if it got him arrested—45 times over his career. We appreciate, in the deepest region of our soul, John Lewis for facing fear and winning, for getting into good trouble, time and time again. We agree with those who call John Lewis an American Founder of the Third American Republic.
Now John Lewis is with his maker and his beloved wife, Lillian Miles Lewis. May we not only never forget; may we carry forth his example as inspiration to get into good, necessary trouble, to make our world, nation, state, family, and neighborhood better.
John Lewis & Duke Ellington: Profiles in Leadership
John Lewis and Duke Ellington both began their work as leaders early on. Both were inspired by the example of their elders.
Duke Ellington, born in 1899, was impressed by many ragtime pianists, especially those he’d hear in poolhalls as a teen. John Lewis, born in 1940, was riveted by accounts of the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. from 1955-1956.
Duke launched his own band by the age of 18. Lewis met Rosa Parks at 17 and with Dr. King at 18.
Within six years, a young Duke had made inroads into the music scene of Washington, D.C and Harlem, meeting and being helped by Will Marion Cook and Willie “The Lion” Smith. Within six years of having met Dr. King, John Lewis became a student activist while in college, organizing sit-ins at lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee, and becoming one of the 13 original Freedom Riders for integration.
Two years later, Lewis helped to organize the March on Washington, where he was one of the speakers on the day of Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Duke’s Black, Brown, and Beige
Within a decade following his first recordings in 1924, Duke Ellington had become one of the best respected and well-known jazz big band leaders. His tenures at the Cotton Club in Harlem and onstage work at Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies gave him the time and space to develop his arranging and orchestration skills, not to mention his early masterpiece songs such as “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “Solitude,” and “In a Sentimental Mood.”
Perhaps inspired by performances in Europe in 1933 and 1934, where he received praise from members of the “serious” music community, Ellington began contemplating and writing longer form pieces. His longest piece, Black, Brown and Beige was a culmination of this inspiration.
The following exposition was commissioned in early 2020 by Jazz at Lincoln Center to accord with the release of the JALC Orchestra’s record of the composition. I was asked to respond to the following questions on video:
What did Black, Brown and Beige represent at the time?
When Duke Ellington premiered Black, Brown and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America, in early 1943, the piece represented several things. First, it represented Ellington and his orchestra's ascendance to the height of America’s cultural scene. They had performed all over the United States and in Europe, but had yet to be featured at Carnegie Hall, America's most famous venue for the performance of European classical music.
Today, many call jazz America’s classic music. Back then? No, that wasn’t the case. Jazz was the popular music of the country, yes, but not thought of by most as a fine art comparable to the high traditions of Europe. So, the premiere of a long-form composition by an American Negro about the Negro American experience, was a big deal.
For Black Americans, Duke Ellington was a culture hero whose artistry, style, and achievement at the pinnacle of the music industry made us beam. Duke was the epitome of elegance and excellence. This is clear from reports and pieces in the black press of the time. His premiering Black, Brown, and Beige at Carnegie was a point of special pride that reinforced our special contribution to America despite slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation.
Though he wrote the piece in six weeks, Ellington had been studying the history of Afro-American life and culture for many years to prepare for the moment. He spoke with many experts and had a library full of books. For Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige represented the fulfillment of a long intention to portray in sound the epic sweep of experience of black folks, who, whether others understood or believed it or not, were and are quintessentially American.
See the video version of this answer here.
What is the legacy of Black, Brown and Beige?
Black, Brown and Beige has a legacy that is tied to jazz, to Ellington's own body of work, to Black Americans and American culture, and to the world.
Within jazz, the work fulfilled a compositional imperative signaled by Scott Joplin as a ragtime composer, Jelly Roll Morton as the first great jazz composer, James P. Johnson, the great exemplar of Eastern ragtime aka “stride piano,” and George Gershwin, whose classic “Rhapsody in Blue” combined symphonic effects with blues and jazz elements. Being confined to the dictates of record companies, of technological limitations such as the length of a recording, and even the tastes of the public, will not confine an artist like Ellington, who needed a wider canvas to express his feeling within form.
Limiting a Duke Ellington to a 3-minute record would be like confining Toni Morrison or Philip Roth to short non-fiction.
After the work was performed, and although some critiqued the musical tone poem as uneven, other composers in jazz were inspired by Ellington’s ambition and example. One clear instance is Wynton Marsalis’s Pulitzer-Prize winning composition, Blood on the Fields, which centered on a love story during slavery times, a period that Ellington intended to cover in Black, Brown, and Beige, but took out.
In Ellington’s own body of work, Black, Brown and Beige was the culmination of a long-form direction he began with Creole Rhapsody, Symphony in Black, and Reminiscing in Tempo, all composed before Black, Brown and Beige. Ellington never again wrote a composition as long, but the moving sacred piece, “Come Sunday,” memorialized in sonic heaven by Mahalia Jackson, inspired his sacred works in the last full decade of his life.
To Black Americans, and Americans overall, the composition takes on the resonances of struggle and labor, whereby Ellington represented rhythmically the work songs of his ancestors. The heroic resilience and fortitude of his cultural kinfolk are captured in swing, as are the blues contours and textures of American life.
Finally, Black, Brown and Beige isn’t isolated from the totality of Ellington’s astounding accomplishments, writing over 1,100 compositions, collaborating with Billy Strayhorn and master musicians in his orchestra, whose styles and personalities he kept in mind while composing. He stands alone in Western music in that regard. Ellington was sui generis.
An Epic Hero for the Ages
Duke Ellington brought the infinite into form with aesthetic statement of such quality that his music is timeless. Both rooted and cosmopolitan, he stylized his own life in composition. He stylized Negro American feeling expressed in rhythm and tune. And by so doing, he also stylized American life and experience overall. He is America’s greatest composer, period—not only in jazz.
Ellington is an everlasting example of an artistic genius whose music had so much range, depth, height and grandeur that it became a universal statement for the 20th century and beyond. Beyond category he was, and, as he said of Mary Lou Williams, Ellington was and is perpetually contemporary.
See the video of my comments above directly below.
P.S.: Thanks to my colleague Amiel Handelsman, who last week wrote a fine newsletter post utilizing the hashtag #BlackHeroesMatter.