Duke Ellington, Percy Grainger, and the status of jazz in the music academy

On October 25, 1932, Percy Grainger invited Duke Ellington and his orchestra to perform “Creole Love Call” as part of a music lecture at New York University. It was the first time any university had invited a jazz musician to perform in an academic context. I will argue that the meeting of Grainger and Ellington is a prism refracting the broader story of the music academy’s slow and reluctant embrace of jazz. This story is, in turn, a cultural reflection of the broader African-American freedom struggle.

Ellington has come to embody the cultural prestige now enjoyed by jazz. He appears on Washington DC’s state quarter, and his statue stands at the northeast corner of Central Park in New York City. In 1932, however, Ellington was known to official music culture only as the leader of a popular dance band and the writer of a few catchy tunes. Although he was already a celebrity, few white people outside of jazz fandom considered Ellington to be a serious artist. That year, he received his first favorable review from a classical critic, followed by endorsements from Percy Grainger and a few other figures from the music establishment. This praise was unusual at the time. Most cultural authorities of the era held jazz in low regard, assigning the same value that hip-hop holds in academic circles today: undeniably popular, vibrant perhaps, but deficient in musical quality, and even, according to some critics, a threat to the nation’s morals.

Ellington’s ascent in stature parallels the social and political gains made by African-Americans in the twentieth century generally. Grainger’s role in the story is more complicated. He was prescient in his admiration for Ellington, and for jazz generally, but this admiration was coupled with condescension and lack of understanding. Grainger was a sui generis eccentric, and his ideas do not neatly map onto the music academy generally. Nevertheless, he is a useful reference point for the partial embrace that universities have made of jazz, and of African-American music generally.

Duke Ellington

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born on April 29, 1899. He grew up in a middle-class family in Washington, DC, which at the time had the nation’s largest urban black population (Tucker, 1990). Ellington’s maternal grandfather had been born a slave, and his father was a butler in Warren Harding’s White House. Most middle-class black families at the time had a piano; the Ellington household had two.

Ellington attended the all-black Armstrong High School, whose principal, Carter G. Woodson, was a historian and the founder of The Journal of Negro Life and History. Woodson insisted that the curriculum put a strong emphasis on black history at all grade levels, and the school culture was one of black pride. Ellington studied harmony in high school and took private piano lessons, but he was not a dedicated student. He began performing in professional settings as a teenager, and by age 20, was leading his own band.

By 1932, Ellington had established himself as a major figure in jazz. He had released recordings of some of his most iconic compositions, including “East St Louis Toodle-oo” (1927), “Mood Indigo” (1930), and “Rockin’ in Rhythm” (1931). His performances at New York’s Cotton Club were broadcast nationally on NBC. He had also been featured in one of the earliest musical short films, Black and Tan (1929). Sound in movies was still a technological novelty at the time, and RKO Radio Pictures produced Black and Tan to showcase their new Photophone system. It is worth examining this film in detail, because it so clearly illustrates the social position occupied by Ellington and his music at the time of its release.

The film is named for “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1928), a theme by Bubber Miley, the first star trumpet player in Ellington’s band. The title refers to black-and-tan nightclubs, integrated (or semi-integrated) bars and speakeasies. Miley based the tune’s opening melody on a spiritual he remembered his mother singing. This melody and its parent spiritual derive in turn from “The Holy City,” a sacred song by the white composer Stephen Adams (Metzer, 1997). The end of Miley’s melody quotes Chopin’s Sonata No. 2 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 35: III, better known as the “funeral march.”

“Black and Tan Fantasy” features the strange timbres of plunger-muted ”growl“ trumpet played by Miley, as well as growl trombone by Sam Nanton. Plunger mutes act as a resonant band-pass filter. By opening and closing the mute, players can sweep the filter up and down the frequency spectrum, creating a “wah-wah” effect. The growl is produced by simultaneously blowing and singing, humming, or gargling. All of Ellington’s horn players used techniques that evoke the human voice, but Miley and Nanton sound more like animals or monsters. These “jungle” sounds were the most distinctive feature of Ellington’s first prominent works, and were the focus of early critical attention.

Ellington’s character in Black and Tan is named after and loosely based on himself, a down-on-his luck musician married to a dancer played by Fredi Washington. The film begins with Ellington and trumpeter Artie Whetsol rehearsing “Black and Tan Fantasy.” (Miley had left Ellington’s band by the time of filming, and Whetsol was his replacement.) They are interrupted by the arrival of two men who have come to repossess Ellington’s piano for lack of payment. These two characters are supposed to be “comical”; one is very tall, the other very short, and they both have the exaggerated mannerisms of minstrel show performers. One has trouble even reading numbers, and both are easily bought off with gin. Ellington plays straight throughout, observing all of this with suave detachment, though we might reasonably assume that he was suppressing offense.

The middle portion of the film is an extended performance sequence by the Ellington orchestra. The music accompanies a series of dancers, first men in tuxedos, then women in “African” costumes. In the final scene, Washington’s character dies, with Ellington and the band at her side, accompanied by a chorus singing the spiritual “Same Train.” Washington asks Ellington and the band to play “Black and Tan Fantasy” for her. As they play, they are accompanied by a chorus singing “The Holy City” with outraised arms projecting exaggerated shadows on the back wall. The film’s blend of minstrel-show comedy and Expressionist tragedy is an uneasy one. Black and Tan is a valuable artifact because it shows how the popular mainstream viewed Ellington in his first decades of fame: as an entertainer, a skilled one to be sure, but a figure of nightclubs and minstrel comedy, not of the concert hall or the classroom.

Seen in this context, it is remarkable that Percy Grainger invited the Ellington orchestra to his class at New York University. Grainger asked them to perform “Creole Love Call” (1928), a slow-tempo blues that evokes the black music of New Orleans. It is unclear why Grainger chose this tune in particular; perhaps he became aware of it after reading critical praise for “Black and Tan Fantasy”—the two songs were paired on their original recorded release.

“Creole Love Call” follows the standard jazz format: a composed melody stated by the entire ensemble, solos on the melody’s chord progression, then another statement of the composed melody to conclude. However, unlike a typical jazz tune, “Creole Love Call” includes very little improvisation. Bubber Miley’s trumpet solo on the tune’s first recording was so iconic that, after he left the group in 1929, Ellington had his replacements reproduce the solo note for note (Lawrence, 2004, p. 91). Evidently, Ellington also felt the same way about the clarinet solo, because that is also identical in subsequent recordings.

With jazz so firmly ensconced as an American art form, it can be shocking to read white criticism of it from the first half of the twentieth century. The critic Winthrop Sargent (1943) echoed highbrow consensus when he wrote that jazz “is not music in the sense that an opera or a symphony is music. It is a variety of folk music” (p. 405). Sargent believed that jazz was a lower form that black audiences embraced because they did not know any better: “Give him the chance to study, and the Negro will soon turn from boogie woogie to Beethoven” (p. 409).

A music education periodical called The Etude devoted its entire August 1924 issue to “The Jazz Problem.”

In his introductory essay, editor James Francis Cooke wrote that jazz would need to be dramatically transformed by composers before it would have any real value: “In its original form it has no place in musical education and deserves none” (quoted in Maita, 2014). While other contributors to the issue had more conflicted and nuanced views of jazz, the general tone was dismissive. Even when they acknowledged that jazz was popular, the writers in The Etude saw its main virtue as bait to lure young people into the study of “serious” music. Grainger’s enthusiasm for jazz is a clear contrast to this attitude—he even wrote a pro-jazz rebuttal in the following issue of the journal.

Ellington was the first jazz composer to be taken at all seriously by classical critics. However, even his supporters found ways to demean him, intentionally or not. Darrell (1932) was the first in-depth critical review of Ellington’s music. He praised Ellington for “economy of means, satisfying proportion of detail, and the sense of inevitability—of anticipation and revelatory fulfillment—that are the decisive qualifications of musical forms” (p. 58, emphasis in original). However, when he placed the music in context, he was stunningly offensive by modern standards:

[W]hen I upturn treasure in what others consider to be the very muck of music, I cannot be surprised or disappointed if my neighbor sees only mud where I see gold, ludicrous eccentricity where I find an expressive expansion of the tonal palette, tawdry tunes instead of deep song, ’nigger music’ instead of ’black beauty’ (p. 58).

While Darrell came to admire “Black and Tan Fantasy,” his initial reaction was derisive:

I laughed like everyone else over its instrumental wa-waing and gargling and gobbling, the piteous whinnying of a very ancient horse, the lugubrious reminiscence of the Chopin funeral march. But as I continued to play the record for the amusement of my friends I laughed less heartily and with less zest. In my ears the whinnies and wa-was began to resolve into new tone colors, distorted and tortured, but agonizingly expressive. The piece took on a surprising individuality and entity as well as an intensity of feeling that was totally incongruous in popular dance music. Beneath all its oddity and perverseness there was a twisted beauty that grew on me more and more and could not be shaken off (p. 58).

In fairness to Darrell, Ellington’s instrumental timbres are startling even now, as I will discuss below.

Lambert (1934) was another early champion of Ellington from within the classical music world, but he too felt the need to qualify his praise with condescension. Lambert prefaced his discussion of Ellington by observing that “Negro talent” was “on the whole more executive than creative” (p. 206), meaning that jazz musicians were better at interpreting other people’s ideas than at having ideas of their own. However, Lambert found Ellington to be “a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction, and the first negro composer of distinction” (p. 214). Furthermore, unlike Grainger, Lambert recognized that Ellington frequently through-composed his music. Finally, Lambert recognized that the canonical form of an Ellington piece is the recording, not the score. Soon after this review was published, The Philadelphia Record interviewed Ellington and asked him to respond to Lambert’s praise. They describe his response as “a look of simple wonder,” and rendering his quotes in dialect, e.g., “Is zat so?” (quoted in Tucker 1993, p. 112). This is likely to be an extreme misrepresentation of the suave and well-mannered Ellington.

In the face of so much disrespect and dismissal, it is remarkable how firm Ellington was in his conviction that he was a legitimate artist. He saw no contradiction between playing for dancers and being a “serious” composer, between playing in concert halls and in high school gyms, or between performing for heads of state and for local Elks clubs (Dance, 1970, p. 11). In a 1930 interview in New York Evening Graphic Magazine, he said, “I am not playing jazz. I am trying to play the natural feelings of a people. I believe that music, popular music of the day, is the real reflector of the nation’s feelings” (quoted in Tucker, 1993, p. 45). Ellington resisted the term “jazz”, not because he felt any shame in it, but because he did not like being boxed into a category.

Ellington saw the black culture he represented as the true creative voice of the United States. He believed not only that black people had created America’s cultural wealth, but that they were also the voice of the nation’s moral conscience, because black Americans embodied the contradiction between the nation’s abstract principles and the reality. In a speech to Scott Methodist Church in 1941, Ellington said:

We stirred in our shackles and our unrest awakened Justice in the hearts of a courageous few, and we recreated in America the desire for true democracy, freedom for all, the brotherhood of man, principles on which the country had been founded… We’re the injection, the shot in the arm, that has kept America and its forgotten principles alive in the fat and corrupt years intervening between our divine conception and our near tragic present (quoted in Tucker, 1999, p. 148).

Ellington’s own compositions reflected his pride in black history. His piece Black, Brown and Beige, premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943, was a “tone parallel to the history of the American Negro.” He also wrote music depicting and celebrating iconic black musicians and entertainers, as well as the black communities in Harlem and New Orleans (Tucker, 1990).

Beyond his outspoken love for black culture, Ellington was not overtly political. For example, he declined an invitation to join the March on Washington in 1963. However, Ellington did play a role in what Kelley (1996) calls “infrapolitics”—subtle protest undertaken in cultural and informal spheres. Ellington’s dignified and decorous public persona demanded respect not just from white people, but from middle-class black people who disdained jazz as vulgar. Ellington’s dandyism made a comparable statement to the prewar black fashion for ostentatious zoot suits:

Seeing oneself and others “dressed up” was enormously important in terms of constructing a collective identity based on something other than wage work, presenting a public challenge to the dominant stereotypes of the black body, and reinforcing a sense of dignity that was perpetually being assaulted (Kelley, 1996, p. 168).

While Ellington’s own style was more bourgeois than the defiantly lower-class zoots, he shared their cultural milieu. For example, Malcolm X (1965), who was a zoot in his younger days, vividly describes dancing to Ellington at the Roseland Ballroom (pp. 76-78).

Percy Grainger

George Percy Aldridge Grainger was born in 1882 in Australia. In the first half of the twentieth century, he was a celebrated concert pianist, composer, arranger, and personality. Like Ellington, Grainger primarily wrote short works, and, like Ellington, he was strongly influenced by a variety of folk and ethnic musics. Grainger was an ardent advocate for the aesthetic value of traditional and folk musics from around the world, and collected hundreds of live recordings of folksong with his Edison Bell cylinder phonograph, long before doing so was a widespread practice (Robinson, 2011).

Grainger’s best-known work is “Country Gardens,” a traditional English folk song that he transcribed and arranged in 1918. Its melody is ineradicably catchy, and has been quoted often by jazz soloists. Charlie Parker notably used it as a tag ending for his quintet arrangement of “April in Paris” (1950). It is possible that midcentury jazz musicians were aware of Grainger’s respect for their music, but it is more likely that the tune was simply popular and easily recognizable (Jarritt Sheel, personal communication, 2017).

Grainger became part-time head of the music department at New York University for the academic year 1932-33. He taught composition and a lecture course, “A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music,“ designed to show commonalities between music of widely varying times and places. Grainger would later publish his course lectures as a book, Music: A Commonsense View of All Types (1934). This book would become a major influence on the nascent field of ethnomusicology (Blacking, 1990).

Grainger was well ahead of his time in his respectful appreciation of jazz.

Seductive, exotic, desocializing elements imputed to Jazz by musical ignoramuses have no musical basis. Musically speaking, the chief characteristics of Jazz are solidity, robustness, refinement, sentiment, friendly warmth. As music it seems to me far less sensuous, passionate or abandoned than the music of many peoples (quoted in Rexroth, 2005, p. 77).

Some of Grainger’s enlightened attitude may have been simple contrarianism; he took evident pleasure in being unconventional and defiant of authority. Still, he deserves credit for questioning the reflexive equation of jazz with sexuality, in stark contrast to then-dominant white attitudes.

Grainger’s teaching was animated by a teleological theory of musical history. He believed that music worldwide progressed in a particular direction: toward increasing freedom from preordained pitches, rhythms, and forms. He predicted that this trend would eventually culminate in a future “Free Music” capable of “expressing all the irregularity, subtlety and complexity of life and nature,” as he wrote in his lecture notes (quoted in Robinson, 2011, p. 289). Grainger saw jazz as an important step toward Free Music. He invited Ellington’s band to perform in his class as an exemplar of free improvisation and “the gliding and off-pitch sounds in jazz” (ibid.). Ellington might have recognized the description of his music as containing gliding pitches, but he would probably have objected that they were never “off-pitch.” He also would have been surprised to see the reference to “free improvisation,” as we will see.

In his lecture notes for Ellington’s appearance, Grainger wrote, “Art Music defined as music fixed by notation—to what extent is Ellington’s music art music (fixed by notation), to what extent does it admit free improvisation (varying with each performance) by individual players” (quoted in Rexroth, 2005, p. 88)? It was common in that era to equate “art music” with “notated music.” It is strange, however, that Grainger used Ellington as an exemplar of “free improvisation.” First of all, as we have noted above, he asked Ellington to perform “Creole Love Call,” which is effectively a through-composed work. Furthermore, the improvisation practiced by 1930s jazz musicians was tightly constrained within song forms with unvarying underlying harmony. There is no record of Grainger asking Ellington his opinions about his own music, or whether it supported Grainger’s theory about Free Music. In this regard, Grainger was part of a long continuum of white musicians and listeners projecting their own ideas and beliefs onto black music.

Grainger may have been musically forward-thinking, but his racial politics were more typical of his time. On the one hand, he was progressive in his recognition that “primitive” peoples and African-Americans made music as beautiful and sophisticated as that of Western composers, if not more so. On the other hand, Grainger was an outspoken white supremacist and anti-Semite.

Must we Nordics go on forever shamming that we do not know that we are overmen in beauty, souldepth, spirit-powers? Must we stand by silently forever while the lower races (French, German, Jews) tell us they own powers & gifts that we know they don’t (quoted in Gilles, Pear & Carroll, 2010, p. 133)?

Grainger’s love for non-Western ethnic music arose in part from a conviction that it was untainted by Jewish influences (Pear, 2006). He filled his correspondence with racist judgments of non-Nordic Europeans. Surprisingly, he did not voice many opinions about non-white people. Perhaps Grainger thought their inferiority was so self-evident as to not even need to be spelled out. It seems more likely, however, that he simply was not as passionate about white supremacy generally as he was about Nordic supremacy over other white people.

Grainger’s appreciation of folk and non-European musics appears to have been strongly and genuinely felt. Rather than simply romanticizing the “noble savage,” Grainger paid close attention to the formal qualities of non-Western musics. For example, he was critical of the assumption that Western classical music is the most sophisticated in the world, pointing out that our notation system is too limited and coarse-grained to accurately describe a variety of folk musics. Grainger also recognized that Western society offers limited opportunities for musical participation and creativity compared to traditional societies around the world. “The fact that art-music has been written down instead of improvised has divided musical creators and executants into two quite separate classes; the former autocratic and the latter comparatively slavish” (Grainger, 1991, p. 13). By contrast, he saw “primitive” peoples as having broad creative freedom, even within the bounds of their own traditions. “The primitive musician unhesitatingly alters the traditional material he has inherited from thousands of unknown talents and geniuses before him to suit his own voice or instruments, or to make it conform to his purely personal taste for rhythm and general style” (Grainger, 1991, p. 6). It was this participatory ethos that Grainger admired about the music of Africans and their diasporic descendants.

Grainger was effusive in his praise for the “home music” of African-Americans, designed to give pleasure to ordinary people: “The gift and tendency to sing and play in groups, partly by ear and by instinct, and to sing and play for the sake of taking part rather than for the sake of the listener, is the truly tribal touch and is present in so much Negro-American music” (Grainger, 1999, p. 140). However, Grainger held the strange belief that African-American music descends more from Anglo-Saxon tradition than that of Africa. He argued that “a great deal of Negro music is typically Nordic, just as a large part of Negro thot [sic] and emotionality is typically Anglo-Saxon” (Grainger, 1999, p. 133). He attributed this influence to African-Americans’ long history of living among white people. While it is conventional to describe jazz as a combination of European harmonies and African rhythms, Grainger believed that syncopation in jazz originated in its Anglo-Saxon rather than African influences. He located the truly unique aspect of jazz not in its rhythms, but in its “sliding tones and off-pitch notes, which are valuable hints of freer (most soulful) art-music to come” (Grainger, 1999, p. 229). In this belief, Grainger stood mostly alone.

It is questionable how much of Grainger’s affection for jazz and folk music translated into respect for the people who created them. He compared the music of “savage races” to the calls of birds and animals, because they had so much unstructured time, and more importantly, unstructured thoughts, habits and ideals (Grainger 1981 (1916)). When he referred to “the unconscious, effortless musical utterances of primitive man” (Grainger 1991 (1915), 2), he implied that this sophisticated music was the product of unsophisticated minds.

Jazz in the Music Academy

Since The Etude published its Jazz Problem issue, the music academy has evolved significantly in its embrace of jazz, and of African-American music generally. How far has it evolved? Before we can answer that, let us examine a brief history of jazz education in the United States. When Duke Ellington was growing up, and for several decades afterward, institutionalized jazz education did not exist. When jazz players studied music formally, they did so in classical or marching band contexts (Kennedy, 2017). Jazz per se was rarely taught in formal settings, so musicians developed the art form through informal mentorship, jam sessions, peer learning, and, in Ellington’s case, self-teaching.

Jazz first entered high schools and colleges not through the official curriculum, but in the form of extracurricular “stage bands” (Karns, 2015). These bands occupied a similar function to campus rock bands now: they played dances and other social functions, and students did not earn academic credit for participating in them. In 1947, North Texas State became the first university in the United States to offer a bachelor’s degree in jazz studies, though they described it as a “dance band major,” since the word “jazz” held unsavory connotations (Hall, 2015). Even historically black colleges and universities were hesitant to offer credit for participation in jazz groups in the 1950s, perhaps feeling that jazz was too low-class to suit their aspirational cultures.

Formal jazz education underwent explosive growth in the 1960s. Over the course of the decade, there was a doubling in the number of high school stage bands, a tripling in the number of colleges offering jazz courses for credit, and a more than fivefold increase in the number of competitive festivals (Kennedy, 2017). The 1960s also saw a change in the music academy’s attitude toward jazz, shifting from condescension or outright hostility to growing acceptance of the music as a legitimate art form (Mark, 1987). Not coincidentally, this occurred at the same time that jazz waned in popularity as it was eclipsed by rock and R&B.

Today, jazz is taught in one form or another by most American college music departments, and by many high schools as well. However, outside of a few specialized institutions like the Berklee College of Music, jazz is a peripheral part of the curriculum. European-descended orchestras, marching bands and choirs continue to dominate school music. Music theory and history curricula focus on the European classical tradition to the near-exclusion of all else. At New York University, for example, all music majors, regardless of specialty or focus, must complete a set of core requirements in European classical theory, history, and ear training. The music history sequence is the familiar litany of white classical composers, with a token jazz musician or two tacked onto the end. Otherwise, jazz as a subject is entirely elective at New York University. Most university music programs are similar.

College-level courses in jazz basics usually present a formalized version of bebop. Students are given lead sheets of midcentury popular standards (including Ellington tunes). They learn to interpret the chord symbols, to associate the chords with scales, and to improvise using those scales. The resulting sound is a smooth and intellectual one, resembling Bill Evans or mid-period John Coltrane. “A novice can start cheaply rhapsodizing scales through pastel harmony instantly, summoning a basic imitation of modern jazz in the Evans mold” (Iverson, 2017). At conservatories, the jazz major attracts students who are interested in popular music of all kinds, since that is as close as the official curriculum permits them to come to rock or hip-hop (Chinen, 2007). However, current popular music is as remote from Bill Evans as it is from Mozart.

Duke Ellington’s compositions tend to be simpler harmonically than most college-level jazz repertoire. Instead, Ellington’s music derives its interest from his orchestrations, and from the distinctive personal timbres of the performers in his ensembles. This is also true of Ellington himself, whose piano playing was less technically adept than later mainstream jazz, and more idiosyncratic. College students may play Ellington tunes, but they do not often do so in an Ellingtonian style. Students are encouraged to develop a harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic voice, but in their tone and sound, they are expected to use the flattened, “cool” affect of 1950s bebop players (Jarritt Sheel, personal communication, 2017). The college approach tends to produce a professional-sounding homogeneity, rather than the “sentimental avant-gardism” (Moten, 2003) of Ellington’s vocalistic cries, growls and wails. Academic jazz also differs crucially from Ellington’s music in its social context and function. For most of his career, Ellington made music for dancers. At college jazz concerts, however, no one is dancing; they sit silently, the same way they would at a classical concert. When college students dance, they do it to hip-hop, techno, or rock. If Ellington himself were a young man today, and he wanted to make sophisticated dance music, he would probably be producing hip-hop beats on a laptop.

Jazz has attained a degree of respect from present-day cultural authorities that would have been shocking to people in 1932. Nevertheless, music education does not take jazz as seriously as it could. It is strange that America’s formal music education institutions place so much more emphasis on the music of eighteenth-century Vienna than they do on the music of twentieth-century America. On the other hand, we might also be surprised that the white mass audience ever valued jazz so highly in the first place, just as we could be similarly surprised at the popularity of other black musics like R&B, rock, soul, funk, techno and hip-hop. While America’s musical culture is a complex blend of styles and genres, the vernacular traditions of the African diaspora make up its core. Mcclary (2000) argues that the “various trickles” of the past hundred years of American music collect into “a mighty river” following a channel cut by the blues (p. 32). It is not obvious that white Americans of all ages, classes and walks of life should so passionately embrace the music of the country’s most oppressed minority group. What is it about black music that has overcome the white mainstream’s general indifference or contempt toward the black people that created it?

One answer might be to say that the music is great, and the white mainstream recognizes its quality. But there must be something else at work. The answer probably lies in the concept of soul, and for the emotional work that soul does for white listeners. Black music expresses the full range of human emotion, but when we talk about soul, we usually mean a recognition of pain and tragedy, coupled with resilience and determination. Soul is the sound of coping with adversity, not by denying or avoiding it, but by confronting it and moving through it. African-Americans have endured the worst aspects of our nation’s social and economic systems while still retaining their humanity. Many white people want emotional support for enduring as well. Small (2011) calls America’s Puritanical industrial capitalist culture “the rational god.” He goes on to describe how the rational god is incompatible with our basic emotional needs.

[T]he people of the African diaspora have been intimately acquainted with the rational god for nearly five hundred years, far longer… than any other of the world’s peoples, and their musicking and their dancing have been tools by means of which they have learned to confront the god and his monstrous system, and to survive (Small, 2011, p. 481).

African-Americans have had to improvise their way through life within white industrial culture, using the scattered inheritance of the African diaspora. A great many white people, myself included, find both the improvisation and the inheritance enviable and inspiring.

Ellington’s music is thoroughly infused with soul. His recordings are both intellectually abstract and warmly bodily; they support quiet introspection and ecstatic social dance; and they encompass joy and anguish, sometimes in the same note. Black performance like Ellington’s is

the ongoing improvisation of a kind of lyricism of the surplus—invagination, rupture, collision, augmentation. This surplus lyricism—think here of the muted, mutating horns of Tricky Sam Nanton or Cootie Williams—is what a lot of people are after when they invoke the art and culture—the radical (both rooted and out there, immanent and transcendent) sensuality—of and for [black] people (Moten, 2003, p. 26).

While Ellington’s music has become canonical, music schools focus on its harmonic and formal aspects, and only rarely touch on its radical sensuality.

The white reception of black American vernacular music undergoes a predictable cycle. During the time that a given style is popular with young black audiences, it is usually reviled by the white mainstream. Then young white audiences become interested in the style, beginning with hipsters and outsiders, who bring along everyone else. As those white listeners get older and attain cultural authority, they advocate for their preferred music styles, which then become canonized. Spirituals were the first African-American form to become canonical “art,” followed by ragtime, then jazz, then soul and R&B. Rock has mostly turned into a canonical music as well, and hip-hop is already in the early stages. This canonization can only safely happen once the music is no longer associated with sensuality and dance. Our cultural gatekeepers continue to find it difficult to see the music that young people enjoy dancing to as “art.” Malcolm X (1965) describes people dancing to Ellington at the Roseland Ballroom as being in an ecstatic frenzy. This is a polar opposite to the atmosphere of the concert hall, or the college classroom. Ellington saw no contradiction between playing for dancers and being an artist, but the academy only fully embraced him once he ceased to be a dance musician. To this day, the music academy remains reluctant to validate social dance or the music that inspires it.

Jazz would appear to be “safe” for formal academic settings. It has been many years since Ellington’s music was associated with hustlers, gangsters, nightclubs and zoots. But the plunger-muted horns still have the power to shock with their bodily intimacy. “The sounds of pain are often indistinguishable from those of ecstasy. Hearing either one makes us uncomfortable, as if we were listening to something not meant for our ears, but that, upon the hearing, draws us into and implicates us in the experience, often as interlopers” (Kapchan, 2017, p. 282). Listening to such sounds is a full-body experience, and our reactions take place very much from the neck down. When we listen to “Creole Love Call” or “Black and Tan Fantasy,” the rhythms and melodies might be safely dated and distant, but the animalistic sounds of the horns continue to be as arresting as an unexpected physical touch.

That college music departments have admitted Ellington to the canon is an improvement over excluding him. But American colleges and universities continue to center the traditions of upper-class Western Europeans from centuries ago. In so doing, they send a message: that European-descended tastes are a fundamental truth rather than a set of arbitrary and contingent preferences, and that white cultural dominance is normative. Music is an art form, but it is also a discipline, a set of techniques and procedures, a technology of cultural power. The state and its laws are “only the terminal forms power takes,” the “institutional crystallization” of forces at play throughout all the hierarchies that make up a society (Foucault, 1978, pp. 92-93). Figures like Ellington are still exceptions, still special cases. When we accord him the full respect he is due, and learn to embrace his process as well as his product, we will send a very different message to students about the value of blackness in general. We will no longer legitimize contempt for blackness, or well-meaning condescension to it.

References

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Blacking, J. (1990). “A commonsense view of all music”: Reflections on Percy Grainger’s contribution to ethnomusicology and music education. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Boyle, J. (2009). The jazz problem?

Bradbury, D. (2005). Duke Ellington. London: Haus Publishing.

Chinen, N. (2007, January 7). Jazz Is alive and well. In the classroom, anyway. The New York Times. New York.

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Discography

Ellington, Duke (1928). Creole Love Call [performed by Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians]. [78 RPM]. Camden, NJ: Victor Talking Machine Co. (February 3, 1928)

Ellington, Duke and Bubber Miley (1928). Black and Tan Fantasie [performed by Duke Ellington and his Washingtonians]. [78 RPM]. Camden, NJ: Victor Talking Machine Co. (February 3, 1928)

Ellington, Duke (1931). Creole Love Call [Performed by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra]. [78 RPM]. New York: RCA Records. (January 20, 1931)