The Ellington Century (54 page)

Beige

Ever since the premiere of
Black, Brown and Beige, Beige
has been the most problematic part of the triptych. While Ellington continued to program parts of
Black
and
Brown
for the rest of his career,
Beige
mainly lived on as a movement titled “Sugar Hill Penthouse”. In the 1965 studio recording Ellington revived the opening sections of
Beige
, but he never performed or recorded its dramatic ending. Walter van de Leur has conjectured that Ellington simply ran out of time and brought Strayhorn in to help complete the movement; otherwise the music of
Black, Brown and Beige
is all by Ellington. Strayhorn composed a long cadenza for Ben Webster, accompanied by a series of chords based on earlier parts of the suite, and interpolated his own older composition, “Symphonette-Rhythmique, which now became “Sugar Hill Penthouse”. When Ellington later performed and recorded a piece by that name, however, it was sometimes Strayhorn's composition and at other times was just its last section, which uses the same melody that Ellington used for a waltz in the earlier part of
Beige.
It is not clear if this phrase, with its distinctive scoring for clarinets and saxes that reminded many critics of Glenn Miller, was collaborative; the Ellington archive contains a sketch for this passage in Ellington's hand.

As presented in January 1943, however,
Beige
was a sizable movement in many contrasting sections:

  1. Modernistic, dissonant, fast introduction

  2. Ragtime-style piano solo that Ellington later called “Bitch's Ball”

  3. Waltz

  4. Interjection of a trumpet solo

  5. Waltz continued

  6. Saxophone cadenza

  7. Short piano solo, leading to…

  8. “Symphonette”, a.k.a. “Sugar Hill Penthouse”, ending with reed chorus

  9. Coda: Fanfares, reprise of “Come Sunday”, portentous piano solo,
Meistersinger-style
thematic summation, like an anthem; up-tempo codetta

Ellington never stated his self-critical thoughts about
Beige;
its performance history, however, suggests that he was happier with Stray-horn's contributions than his own. “Sugar Hill Penthouse” soon entered the band's repertory. The poem reveals that Ellington had set himself a difficult task, contrasting the fake view of Harlem with the real one. The opening sections of
Beige
show that, as we might expect, Ellington had no problem evoking the 1920s fantasy Harlem of “Mongrel Manhattan”. He had been there, and his music, particularly in its jungle substyle, had defined the era. If we compare the music of
Black, Brown and Beige
with that of
Symphony in Black
, however, we can see how far Ellington had evolved in musical technique and in historical awareness. The score for the short film, a mix of new music
and old, illustrated scenes from black life that were clichés of 1920s theater and nightclubs—a little bit of
Show Boat
, a little Cotton Club, a little
Green Pastures.
The stylized visual language of much of the movie treated black bodies as aesthetic objects, African sculptures, with one-dimensional emotions: sorrow, jealousy, revelry. The “Laborers” section just revived the imagery of “Old Man River”. The song of sorrow featured a preacher with arms stretched upward like De Lawd in
Green Pastures.
The central “Jealousy” section, known for its performance by Billie Holiday, linked the blues in a stereotyped way to a fallen woman, an association Ellington excoriated in
Porgy and Bess.

Much of the music in
Beige
departed from the two contrasting voices—one satiric, one prophetic—found in the poem, suggesting that Ellington was pursuing a different musical program. In his memoirs Mercer Ellington suggested an angle in the music not present in the poem: “It also embodied a criticism of his own race and its caste system.”
³⁰
Roi Ottley spelled out that system in a chapter titled “The Café-au-Lait Society” in
New World a-Comin'
, which also appeared in 1943: “Social distinctions developed among Negroes as early as slavery. At first, house servants drew the line against field-hands; later the mark of distinction was the amount of aristocratic ‘white' blood one possessed, and finally the length of time one was freed.”
³¹
In Harlem the light-skinned elite lived in the elegant apartment buildings on Sugar Hill, “the most modern and beautiful residential area for Negroes in Black America.”
³²
Ottley, though, further distinguished between the older Negro elite, professionals who moved in their own segregated world, and the “café society” of Harlem's artists and intellectuals who might be heard discussing “the relative merits of Count Basie and Benny Goodman, or the possible musical importance of Duke Ellington's ‘Concerto for Cootie.'”
³³

We may hear Ellington's tone parallels for both of these “beige” elites in the two extended lyrical sections of
Beige
, the waltz and “Sugar Hill Penthouse”. These sections may also represent two different generations. Though Ellington's parents were middle class, they emulated the tastes and decorum of the black aristocracy. They lived in Northwest Washington, whose residents, according to Rex Stewart, “were the lighter complexioned people with the better-type jobs, such as schoolteachers, postmen, clerks or in government service.”
³⁴
We can hear the waltz as an affectionate portrait of his parents, both his father, who “raised his family as though he were a millionaire” and was, Ellington recalled, “ a great dancer (ballroom that is), a connoisseur of vintages,
and unsurpassed at creating an aura of conviviality”,
³⁵
and his mother, whom he thought of as “the most beautiful mother in the world.”
³⁶
Ellington viewed their social aspirations in a kindly manner; after all, they were the source of his own nobility. The waltz, an extended lyrical “concerto” for trumpeter Harold Baker, gradually loses its inhibitions and reveals a “ragtime” subtext that Ellington deployed more overtly later in the waltz depicting Lady Macbeth. His parents also must have had a less inhibited, down-home side.

If his parents aspired to the life of the African American elite, Billy Strayhorn, who was around the same age as Ellington's son, Mercer, represented the other facet of the upper crust, its café society. Unlike Daisy Ellington, Billy Strayhorn was by no means beige in complexion, nor was he conventional in his lifestyle. A free spirit, not deterred by his short stature, dark skin, or homosexuality, he was as at home in Paris or Hollywood as he was in Harlem. His music demonstrated an equal disregard for convention; his “Dirge”, which was performed at Carnegie Hall after the intermission, barely seemed like jazz at all. Barry Ulanov wrote that it “stumped the audience and sounded more like Milhaud and the latter-day Stravinsky than Ellington”, but the “Stomp” that followed, more familiar as “Johnny Come Lately”, was as swinging a number as could be imagined. Strayhorn could be seen as an embodiment of the freedom that Boola had first perceived as a possibility hundreds of years before. What better way to illustrate that freedom than through Strayhorn's own music? Ellington may have incorporated “Symphonette” into
Beige
not as an act of last-minute bricolage but as a deliberate tribute. Strayhorn, after all, would also contribute significantly to the
Perfume Suite
and the
Deep South Suite
without the impetus of a looming deadline.

Emblems of a past and future unfettered by prejudice, Ellington's parents and Billy Strayhorn represented aspects of the unseen Harlem that Ellington hoped would dislodge the old stereotypes. But in giving so much of
Beige
over to these intimate portraits, Ellington had strayed far from the much more public and political agenda he outlined in the poem, and when the more rhetorical closing section of
Beige
finally arrived, it sounded tacked on. Rather than rewrite the movement, however, Ellington soon composed two works that stayed focused on its political goals and also worked out some unresolved musical problems. We can hear Ellington's critique of
Beige
in two of its sequels,
New World A-Comin'
and
Harlem.

When the Ellington Orchestra returned to Carnegie Hall in December 1943 it did not reprise any of
Black, Brown and Beige
but instead presented the premiere of
New World A-Comin'
, which Graham Lock aptly terms its “conceptual successor, the evocation of the visionary future”. The new work, a compact piano concerto in one movement, took its title from Roi Ottley's book about Harlem, which had appeared in August 1943 and would win the Peabody Award for literature. Born in Harlem, Ottley had a successful career as an athlete and journalist, eventually becoming a regular columnist for the
Chicago Tribune.
His charmingly knowledgeable book was a far more sophisticated work of literature than Ellington's poem and a more nuanced history; it might be considered an uptown equivalent of Frederick Lewis Allen's
Only Yesterday
, a masterfully written account of New York in the roaring 1920s. Where Allen, writing in 1931, described a recent past that suddenly seemed remote, Ottley's book looked toward a future: “The Negro may not be able to predict the future, but he knows what he wants—liberty and peace, and an enriched life, free of want, oppression, violence and proscription.”
³⁷

Ottley's words were not hollow rhetoric. His book contained a specific agenda, the “Eight Point Program” that black leaders had presented to the President demanding the end to all laws that distinguished citizens on the basis of color, the guarantee of civil liberties, abolition of the poll tax, an end to lynching, and “representation for Negroes on all missions, political and technical, which will be sent to the peace conference”. Ottley also documented how Nazi and Japanese agents were already exploiting widespread if not majority disaffection with the war in the black community. The war would only be won, Ottley argued, as a shared fight for American freedom: “This war, undeniably, belongs to the Negro as well as to the white man. To this extent, it may be called a ‘People's War'—for in spite of selfish interests a new world is a-coming with the sweep and fury of the Resurrection.
³⁸

Though it used Ottley's title, Ellington's composition surprisingly leapfrogged across the burning rhetoric of the present to the imagined future. Ellington was once again demonstrating musically the ideological point he had made in “Light”, that freedom had to be imagined in order to be realized. In sharp contrast to the militant fanfare of
Black
, the opening theme seems to sing Ottley's title with a comforting, almost nostalgic warmth. It represented, as Ellington said, a vision of the “beautiful things to come that have already been enjoyed”. Instead of
mounting a fight for equality Ellington composed music for a time when that fight would be only a memory.

New World A-Comin'
also fulfilled the transmuted operatic ambitions of
Black, Brown and Beige.
The one instrumental voice that had not come to the fore in
Black
and
Brown
was Ellington's own. He had reserved this personal statement for
Beige
, but it appeared half-formed in the piano solo, which Ellington later identified as “Bitch's Ball”, a piece he had written in 1914, and in the Gershwinesque cadenza that serves as a transition to the final section of the movement. Ellington would include piano solos similar to “Bitch's Ball” in the
Perfume Suite
(“Dancers in Love”) and the
Deep South Suite
(“There Was Nobody Looking”); in
Beige
, however, it seems all too short and unrelated to the extended waltz that follows. The modernistic cadenzas in
Beige
sound like vestiges of an anxious rivalry with Gershwin that went back at least as far as “Creole Rhapsody”. If the piano were to assume a leading role in
Beige
it would unavoidably risk a comparison with
Rhapsody in Blue.
In
Beige
, though, that starring role emerged only tentatively; in
New World A-Comin'
it appears in terms that are so thoroughly Ellingtonian that further comparison to Gershwin is irrelevant. The piece is a free-flowing dialogue between a piano and orchestra equally steeped in the Ellington style; the orchestra does not oppose the soloist but amplifies its ideas.

Although it was composed in 1950 (aboard the
Île de France
on the way back from a European tour),
Harlem
(commissioned by the NBC Symphony and premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House) captured the mood and scope of Ottley's book even more powerfully than
New World
and can be heard as the ultimate realization of
Beige.
Ottley, whose parents emigrated to Harlem from Grenada, emphasized the diverse communities of Harlem in his provocatively titled chapter “How Colored Is Harlem?” In
Beige
, Ellington had shaped African American history so that it all seemed to lead to magenta-hazed Sugar Hill and its privileged inhabitants. That may have been
his
story, but it was only part of a far broader picture.

Harlem
, we might say, turns time into space; it is geography rather than history, traversing neighborhoods populated by black, brown, and beige rather than moving from past to future. And yet, more successfully than any of Ellington's extended works, it tells a musical story, a transformation and reevaluation of the poetic “Beige”. The poem set out to contrast false and true views of Harlem. The music offers a different and inclusive vision, more parallel with Ottley's description:

Harlem! The word itself signifies a vast, crowded area teeming with black men. Its population is pushing hard toward a million, and is crammed into two square miles. Some are foreign born and come from diverse racial, religious and national origins. Though their skins may be black, brown, yellow or white they are all seeking a way out of the impasses of Negro life. To this end, the Negro community is a big forum of soapbox oratory. Day-to-day living seems to be an endless vigil of picket lines, strikes, boycotts, mammoth mass meetings, as well as a series of colorful parades, jazzy picnics, and easy stomping at the Savoy Ballroom. But comes Sunday, everybody praises God—faithfully, noisily.
³⁹