Beyond the Cotton Club: The Persistence of Duke Ellington's Jungle Style

Abstract

The unique sound of the subset of Duke Ellington's music that came to be known as “jungle style” predates the extra-musical associations of exotic, primitive Africa and Africans that were tied to it once Ellington began working at Harlem's Cotton Club in the late 1920s. Significantly, while the expectations of early 20^th-century white American audiences shaped the programmatic meaning of early works like Echoes of the Jungle, Ellington did not shed the sounds or the African associations of jungle style after leaving the Cotton Club. Near the end of his career, the by then internationally famous Ellington was writing African-themed pieces in jungle style not for white audiences seeking exotic entertainment, but for black African audiences. Tracing Ellington's use of jungle style from its origins before the Cotton Club, through his efforts to shift his public image from wild jungle entertainer to artistically significant composer, and to works like La Plus Belle Africaine and Togo Brava Suite that were composed for specifically African contexts in the late 1960s and 1970s shows his changing relationship to this style and its associations over time. In the end, Ellington claimed both the sounds and idea of jungle style as his own by choosing to link them not in a situation where his employer demanded it, but of his own volition as an expression of his relationship to the African Diaspora.

Notes

¹Jim Haskins, The Cotton Club (New York: Random House, 1977), 75.

²Duke Ellington, Early Ellington: The Complete Brunswick and Vocalion Recordings, GRD-3-640 GR, 1994, compact discs.

³Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music is my Mistress, (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1973), 337.

⁴Although Ellington did not always necessarily write music with a title already in mind and also sometimes changed the title of songs between recording them and releasing them or to rework them for other settings—turning Concerto For Cootie into Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me, for example—the titles under which works were performed or recorded are an important aspect of the music's context. Regardless of Ellington's intentions during his compositional process, the titles that listeners associated with pieces as they heard them informed the way they received the music and the associations they formed between abstract sound and extra-musical meaning. Additionally, recent work by Edward Green supports the viability of programmatic readings of Ellington's work, even in the case of a piece with two titles written on the manuscript score. See his “‘Harlem Air Shaft’: A True Programmatic Composition?” Journal of Jazz Studies vol. 7 no. 1 (Spring 2011), 28–46.

⁵Quoted by Alfred Frankenstein, “‘Hot is something about a tree,’ says the Duke,” San Francisco Chronicle (9 November 1941).

⁷James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (London: Michael Joseph, 1987), 93.

⁶Norman C. Weinstein, A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (Metuchen, N.J. and London: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 12.

⁹Lisa Barg, “National Voices/Modernist Histories: Race, Performance and Remembrance in American Music, 1927–1943,” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2001), 123.

¹¹Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 102.

¹³Ibid., 84–85.

⁸Richard Middleton, “Musical Belongings: Western Music and Its Low-Other,” in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, Georgina Born, ed. (Ewing, NJ: University of California Press, 2000), 72.

¹⁰Ibid., 134.

¹²Ibid., 84.

¹⁴Graham Lock points out that jungle-themed titles were rare even during Ellington's Cotton Club residency and that they all but disappeared afterward. Blutopia, 83–86.

¹⁵Janet Mabie, “Ellington's ‘Mood in Indigo’: Harlem's ‘Duke’ Seeks to Express His Race,” in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 43.

¹⁶Ibid, 43.

²⁰Penny M. von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 146.

²¹John Storm Roberts, Latin Jazz: The First of the Fusions, 1880s to Today, (New York: Schirmer Books, 1999), 140.

²²Ellington, Music, 350.

¹⁷Barry Ulanov, “The Ellington Programme,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Robert O'Meally, ed. (New York, Columbia University Press, 1998), 169.

¹⁸The Ellington band first toured Europe in 1933 and continued to appear there fairly regularly through the 1970s. The groups international travels increased in the 1960s when they began to tour for the U.S. State Department. The first of these diplomatic tours was to the Middle East and Southern Asia in 1963, and their final one was a decade later in 1973 with performances in Zambia and Ethiopia. In between, they made numerous other trips including one to Japan in 1964, a 1968 tour of Central and South America, and performances in Burma and Laos in 1970.

¹⁹Walter van de Leur notes the Far East Suite as the exception to this trend, writing that it is “different from earlier suites” in that it “drew on musical materials instead of nonmusical themes” and “intelligently transformed perceived musical idioms into idiosyncratic works” and “avoided any all too obvious Orientalisms.” Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 167.

²³Ibid, 351.

²⁴Ellington, Music, 337.

²⁵See, for instance, Mimi Clar, “The Style of Duke Ellington,” in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 303–311.

²⁶Middleton, “Musical Belongings,” 72.

²⁷Quoted by Nat Shapiro and Nat Henthoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (London: Peter Davies, 1955), 231.

²⁸Ellington, Music, 71–72.

²⁹See “The Washingtonians: First New York Review (1923)” and “Reviews from the Kentucky Club (1925)” in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

³⁰Middleton, “Musical Belongings,” 72.

³¹Thomas L. Riis, Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890–1915 (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989).

³²Ellington, Music, 80.

³³Chadwick Jenkins, “A Question of Containment: Duke Ellington and Early Radio,” American Music vol. 26, no. 4 (Winter 2008), 415–441.

³⁴Ibid., 82.

³⁵Duke Ellington, Togo Brava Suite, United Artists Records UXS-92, 1974, LPs.

³⁷Ibid., 64.

³⁶R. D. Darrell, “Black Beauty,” in in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 57–65.

³⁸Florence Zunser, “‘Opera Must Die,’ Says Galli-Curci! Long Live the Blues!” in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 45.

³⁹See Mark Tucker, “The Genesis of Black, Brown, and Beige,” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 13, no. 2 (Autumn, 1993), 67–86.

⁴⁰Ibid., 76.

⁴¹Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington (New York: Creative Age Press, 1946), 253. Tucker offers additional evidence for the possibility that Ko-Ko originated as an African scene from Boola, suggesting that its introductory rhythmic figure relates to a “percussive leitmotif” that ties Black, Brown, and Beige to a handwritten sketch of Boola. See “The Genesis,” 142.

⁴⁴Ibid., 288.

⁴²Ellington's large-scale concert works, beginning with Reminiscing in Tempo of 1935, have been the source of considerable controversy. They are often attacked as either betraying the improvisatory nature of jazz by being too classically oriented or failing to achieve the status of true concert works by lacking organic formal unity. More recent scholarship on Ellington by Stefano Zenni, John Howland, David Scriff, John Wriggle and others marks a trend toward more serious considerations of his extended pieces as unique entities that require analyses based on their own independent aesthetic criteria.

⁴³André Hodeir, “A Masterpiece: Concerto for Cootie,” in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 277.

⁴⁵André Hodeir, “Why Did Ellington ‘Remake’ His Masterpiece?,” in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 298, 300. [Italics in original.]

⁴⁶Mark Tucker, “The Genesis of Black, Brown, and Beige,” 74.

⁴⁷John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), p. 5.

⁵⁰“Advertising Manual: Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra” (1931) quoted in Cohen, “The Marketing of Duke Ellington,” 299–300.

⁵¹Cohen, “The Marketing of Duke Ellington,” 301.

⁴⁸Ibid., p. 39.

⁴⁹Harvey G. Cohen, “The Marketing of Duke Ellington: Setting the Strategy for an African American Maestro,” The Journal of African American History vol. 89, no. 4 (Autumn, 2004), 299.

⁵²Floyd G. Snelson, “Story of Duke Ellington's Rise to Kingship of Jazz Reads Like Fiction…,” The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 55.

⁵⁴Ibid., 296.

⁵³Cohen, “The Marketing of Duke Ellington,” 295.

⁵⁷Ibid., 272.

⁵⁵Gunther Schuller, “The Future of Form in Jazz,” Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 20.

⁵⁶Harvey Cohen, Duke Ellington's America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 4.

⁵⁹Ibid., 61.

⁶⁰Ibid., 106.

⁵⁸Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 12.

⁶¹The writings of Amiri Baraka, Albert Murray, John Gennari, Eric Porter, and many others explore the significance of jazz as a medium for specifically African American expression in the 1960s. Much of this work is based in the interpretation of the blues as a unifying aesthetic for African American culture (see, for example, Travis Jackson, “Jazz Performance as Ritual: The Blues Aesthetic and the African Diaspora,” The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective ed. Ingrid Monson [New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000], 23–82) or emerging avant-garde styles of the time as radical artistic demands for broader social and political freedoms (see John Gennari, “The Shock of the New: Black Freedom, the Counterculture, and 1960s Jazz Criticism,” Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 251–298). Despite his consistent presence as a performer at this time, mentions of the social or political significance of Ellington's later work are rare in these discussions, perhaps because of his status as more of a living legend than an avant-garde figure by the 1960s.

⁶²Ibid., 133.

⁶³Ibid., 151.

⁶⁴Duke Ellington, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, Fantasy 9498, 1975, LP.

⁶⁵Duke Ellington, A Drum is a Woman, Columbia 951, 1956, LP.

⁶⁷Ibid., 337–338.

⁶⁶Ellington, Music, 337.

⁶⁸Lock, Blutopia, p. 84.

⁷²Zenni, “The Aesthetics of Duke Ellington's Suites,” 20.

⁶⁹Stefano Zenni, “The Aesthetics of Duke Ellington's Suites: The Case of ‘Togo Brava’” Black Music Research Journal vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 2001), p. 11.

⁷⁰Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (London: Elm Tree Books, 1977), p. 153.

⁷¹For more information on the genesis of this work, see Zenni, “The Aesthetics of Duke Ellington's Suites.” In brief, Ellington wrote and recorded seven movements in June of 1971, giving each a four-letter title to identify it. This recording was not released during his lifetime. In July, he performed four of these movements at the work's premiere. In October of the same year, the suite was recorded at a live performance in Bristol, England. This recording was released on Ellington's record, Togo Brava Suite, and this is the version of the work I consider here (United Artists UXS-92, 1971). After Ellington's death, all seven movements from the June recording session were released (Storyville STCD8323, 2001).

⁷⁴Howland, Ellington Uptown, 13.

⁷³Tucker, “The Origins of Black, Brown, and Beige,” 69–72.

⁷⁵Ellington quoted by Howland, Ellington Uptown, 290.

⁷⁶Eric Porter, What is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1.