Jazz Remains the Sound of Modernism
Always he appeared immaculate, always elegant—when Duke Ellington took the stage at Carnegie Hall in January of 1943 for the premier of his Black, Brown and Beige symphony it was in white tie and tailed black tuxedo. Fastidious as a musician and uncompromising as a band leader, Ellington expected nothing less than polish when it came to his appearance and comportment, especially as the United States’ greatest composer making his debut in its greatest concert hall at the belated age of 43. Ellington was perhaps most responsible for extending jazz’s reach beyond juke joints and uptown clubs, of establishing it as what the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has termed “America’s classical music.”
European classical music influenced by jazz had been played here before—, —but nothing quite of the magnitude of Ellington’s new composition. Molding the syncopated sound of American jazz into the movements of European symphonic music, Ellington desired “an authentic record of my race written by a member of it.” By the time he took the stage at Carnegie Hall, Ellington was already either the composer or consummate performer of jazz standards like “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing” or “Take the A Train,” a music that conveyed American modernism, the sonic equivalent of a poem or a painting, compositions that
