NPR.org: 'History As Symphony: The African-American Experience In Jazz Suites'

["Detail from the original cover art to Duke Ellington's 1944 studio recording Black, Brown and Beige. Courtesy of the artist"]

Duke Ellington (1899-1974), James P. Johnson (1894-1955) and William Grant Still (1895-1978) are profiled at AfriClassical.com, which features a Works list for William Grant Still by Dominique-René de Lerma, http://www.CasaMusicaledelerma.com

A Blog Supreme From NPR Jazz
From WFIU

by David Brent Johnson

February 21, 2013 4:15 PM

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s inspired several black artists to explore their African heritage and the black experience in America, from enslavement to life after emancipation and migration to cities in the north. In the musical world, pianist James P. Johnson composed Yamekraw: A Negro Rhapsody, a 12-minute portrait of a black community in Savannah, Ga. Yamekraw was orchestrated for a 1928 performance at Carnegie Hall by black composer William Grant Still, who would write his own Afro American Symphony in 1930.

Since then, many more African-American artists have employed the expansive concepts of suites, symphonies and extended works to render the saga of black life from Africa to America. Here are excerpts from five extended jazz representations of black history.

History As Symphony: The African-American Experience In Jazz Suites

In 1931, Duke Ellington told a reporter, "I'm going to compose a musical evolution of the Negro race." The resulting Black, Brown and Beige: a Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America, which made its debut at Carnegie Hall in 1943, is an inaugural musical monument in the genre of extended jazz works. Ellington had been building toward it for years, writing longer pieces such as "Reminiscing in Tempo" in 1935 and the musical revue Jump for Joy in 1941, and laboring throughout the 1930s on an eventually abandoned "negro opera" called Boola. Although white establishment critics were infamously cool in their reception to Ellington's 43-minute work, simply presenting a piece of such scope in a venue like Carnegie amounted to a radical act of black pride: a declaration that the life, history and identity of African-Americans were equal in significance to their white counterparts.

"West Indian Dance," "Emancipation Celebration," and "Sugar Hill Penthouse" were three short pieces that Ellington recorded in 1944 as part of the first studio recording of the suite. "West Indian Dance" represented the influence of black slaves and laborers from the Caribbean region; "Emancipation Celebration" reflected the feelings of slaves upon gaining their freedom after the Civil War; and "Sugar Hill Penthouse" depicted the relatively affluent life of some African-Americans in a part of 20th-century Harlem.