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Duke sometimes thinks that it is good business to conceal . . . his interest in American Negro history. He doubts if it adds to his popularity in Arkansas, say, to have it known that in books he has read about Negro slave revolts he has heavily underlined paragraphs about the exploits of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey . . . New acquaintances are always surprised when they learn that Duke has written poetry in which he advances the thesis that the rhythm of jazz has been beaten into the Negro race by three centuries of oppression. The four beats to a bar in jazz are also found, he maintains in verse, in the Negro pulse. Duke doesn't like to show people his poetry. "You can say anything you want on the trombone, but you gotta be careful with words" he explains.
-Richard O. Boyer, New Yorker, 1944'
On January 23, 1943, the Duke Ellington orchestra appeared in its first concert at Carnegie Hall, amid an interracial audience featuring many celebrities and the biggest media build-up yet assembled on Ellington's behalf. The highlight of the evening was the premiere of his longest extended work, the forty-plus-minute Black, Brown and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro, an ambitious multipart work that programmatically illustrated black history from the African continent to the African American contribution in World War II. With this event, Ellington used the music business power at his disposal, as well as the patriotic sentiments swirling around American engagement in World War II, to place the subjects of black achievement, pride, and history into the national consciousness even more fully than he had previously. The groundbreaking music of Black, Brown and Beige and Ellington's ambitions for its status as a historical text make it clear that Ellington needs to be viewed as a significant figure in American history, as well as in American music.
The premiere of Black, Brown and Beige represented the highest profile example of Ellington's lifelong efforts to advance the politics of race through music, lifestyle, and image, but rarely words. No black American had ever been so widely hailed around the world as a major serious artistic figure without the stereotypes usually affixed to black entertainers....