Beyond the Cotton Club

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Beyond the Cotton Club: The

Persistence of Duke Ellington's Jungle

StyleKimberley Hannon Teal

Published online: 08 Jan 2013.

To cite this article:Kimberley Hannon Teal (2012) Beyond the Cotton Club: The Persistence of DukeEllington's Jungle Style, Jazz Perspectives, 6:1-2, 123-149, DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2012.721292

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Beyond the Cotton Club: The

Persistence of Duke Ellingtons JungleStyle

Kimberley Hannon Teal

Its 1927. Jim Crow laws still dominate the southern United States, but the Great

Migration has led to a blossoming of African American culture in the urban centers

of the north. A curious audience from downtown gathers at 142nd

Street and LenoxAvenue in New York City for a show at the Cotton Club. Despite (or perhaps

because of) its Harlem address, the club is packed with white patrons served by a

black staff. Against a backdrop depicting a southern plantation setting, a troupe of

chorus girlsall required to be under 21 years of age and over ve feet, six inches

tall, all with skin color that is not white yet nothing darker than a light olive

tint,present a sexualized and primitivistic picture of a distant African jungle in

their scanty feathered costumes.1 Various shows offer up African women as tasty deli-

cacies for white spectators, revues with titles like Hot Chocolates,and Its the Black-

berries.

The young Duke Ellington, who has recently composed his own

rst showentitled Chocolate Kiddies, takes the stage with his orchestra to present his

musical conjuring of an imagined Africa.

A studio recording of Ellingtons Echoes of the Junglefrom 1931 offers a taste of what the

Cotton Club sounded like.2 The tunes openingwa-wasfrom a brass section equipped

with plunger mutes are set in call-and-response alternation with blues-inected scoops

and bends by a saxophone soloist. The wail of a high clarinet can be heard creeping in

over the top of the texture as plodding drums, bass, and banjo roughly articulate the

steady, insistent pulse. The emotional high-point of this brief performance comes in a

wild, voice-like trombone solo full of growls and smears over an ostinato of repeated

messy falls that the saxophone section plays as background gures. Following this solo,a dizzying up-and-down slidinggure is passed back and forth between a clarinet and

a banjo, adding to the strangeness of the developing jungle atmosphere.

Fast forward to 1966, two years after Congress passed the monumental Civil Rights

Act. The Civil Rights Movement has created signicant changes in the racial landscape

of the United States, and Black Nationalist groups and Black Arts initiatives have begun

to assert a denite presence in American culture. Across the globe, Senegal is the host

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.

Jazz Perspectives, 2012Vol. 6, Nos. 12, 123149, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2012.721292

2012 Taylor & Francis


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nation of the rst World Festival of Negro Arts. Over two thousand artists from Africa

and the African Diaspora gather to share and celebrate their art. Ellington is performing

at the festival as a part of an international tour sponsored by the U.S. State Department,

appearing now an ofcial representative of American culture rather than its exotic

other. He remembers the event as follows:

The 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, is a really great accomplish-ment. Everyeld of art is represented. The Palace of Art is crammed with paintingsfrom eighty-six countries. The Hall of Justice is packed full of sculpture. Space equalto ve square blocks is devoted to literature, poetry, photography, dance, song, music,and the theatre. Never before or since has the Black Artist been so magnicently rep-resented and displayed.

Every night in the concert hall the native theatre of a different country is presentedwithout limitation of any kindAnd every night, on the balcony of the Engar Hotel, Isit and listen to the sea singing her songs of the historic past on the island from whichthe slaves were shipped. Farther in the distance, I can hear the tribes that have gath-

ered on another island to rehearse for their show [the] next day. And then sometimesI wondered whether it was really a rehearsal, or was it a soul brothers ceremonialgathering with all of its mystical authenticity

After writing African music for thirty-ve years, here I am at last in Africa! I can onlyhope and wish that our performance ofLa Plus Belle Africaine,which I have writtenin anticipation of the occasion, will mean something to the people gathered here.3

Ellington and his orchestra take the stage to perform his new composition, presented as

depicting a beautiful African woman.4 The decades that have passed sinceEchoes of the

Jungleare clearly evident because of the funk-inspired drum grooves and spacious

extension of solos, but equally striking are the elements of this work that hearken

back to the Cotton Club days. Ellingtons musical Africa remains based in the use ofpounding drums, shrill screams from the woodwinds, rough-edged brass playing,

simple and repetitive melodies, call-and-response gestures, insistent background osti-

nati, and a heavy dose of blues inection.

* * *

What is Ellingtons jungle? Certainly, jungle style emerged from an urban American context

and a modern sound palette, but the extra-musical associations tied to pieces like Echoes of

the Jungleand La Plus Belle Africainecome with their own history of both real and imagined

African imagery. Ellingtons 1941 comments on preparing an African scene for an intendedopera lay out these two Africas, the literal and the ctionalized, that are the subjects of

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 examplethe titles under which

works were performed or recorded are an important aspect of the music s context. Regardless of Ellingtons inten-

tions 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 Elling-

tons work, even in the case of a piece with two titles written on the manuscript score. See hisHarlem Air Shaft: ATrue Programmatic Composition?Journal of Jazz Studiesvol. 7 no. 1 (Spring 2011), 2846.

124 Beyond the Cotton Club


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numerous compositionsfrom throughout his life.He said of hisprospective scenelaidin

Africa that The music there is mostly imaginary, because no one today knows what

African Negro music was like in the days of the early slave trade.5 In this statement

made at the midpoint of his career, after he has written jungle-style works paired with

African imagery but before he has visited the place they evoke, Ellington identies Africa

as a real place and a part of his heritage, and he also presents it as a mysterious history

that he is willing to guess at musically. Yet, eventually, imagination and reality merge as

Ellingtons jungle idiominitially developed in New York City during the 1920s

reappears in the radically different context of 1960s Senegal, raising questions about how

his entire body of jungle and African-themed works might be read.

The racial tensions inherent in Ellingtons Cotton Club performances from the

beginning of his career have prompted a great deal of comment on the signicance

of early jungle style pieces. Norman Weinsteins perspective is representative of the

most positive end of a spectrum of readings that place Ellington as everything from

a sincere advocate of Africa able to transcend prejudices through his art to a commer-cially motivated panderer. In hisA Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz,Wein-

stein offers jungle style as an example of how one musician took the racist notion of

Africa as a primitive jungle and deconstructed that stereotype through his music so that

listeners could see a fresh Africa.6 James Lincoln Colliers interpretation presents the

opposite extreme in tending toward a view of an opportunistic Ellington happy to take

advantage of his ignorant white audience. In Colliers words, Ellington and his manager

Irving Millis seized on the idea of jungle musiceven though,

The basis for the whole thing was the belief of many white Americans that blacks were

only a step removed from the jungle tribe with its weirdrites and savage dances. Toanybody with an understanding of African tribal society, to say nothing of blackAmerican culture, it was all ludicrous.7

In Colliers reading, though Ellington himself is well aware of the ridiculousness of his

pretended jungle persona, there is no hidden message of Weinsteins fresh Africa

working against established stereotypes while seeming to play into them.

Several recent interpretations, however, tend more toward the middle ground,

recognizing the obvious imbalance of power in these early performances but also salva-

ging a certain element of racial pride for Ellington by reading them as knowingly ironic

and capable of simultaneously evoking and challenging the concept of African primi-

tivism. As Richard Middleton puts it, The result, arguably, is an almost garish jungle

evocation, delivered however with a gloss which distances the musicians from the

message: Man, look how terribly primitive we are! they seem to say.8 Along

5Quoted by Alfred Frankenstein, Hot is something about a tree, says the Duke, San Francisco Chronicle (9

November 1941).6Norman C. Weinstein, A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz(Metuchen, N.J. and London: Scarecrow

Press, 1992), 12.7James Lincoln Collier,Duke Ellington (London: Michael Joseph, 1987), 93.8Richard 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 CaliforniaPress, 2000), 72.

Jazz Perspectives 125


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similar lines, Lisa Bargs work contextualizes the sounds of jungle style within the thea-

trical environment of the nightclub show in order to demonstrate that while Elling-

tons jungle style successfully engaged the primitivist fantasies of white audiences,it

also acted as a medium or mask through which Ellington and his musicians

employed a range of alternative expressive modes and practices rooted in AfricanAmerican vernacular traditions, practices that revealed the ambiguities and contra-dictions of black modernism.9

In Bargs analysis, the papier mach jungle of the Cotton Club that constituted a

humorous, sexualized, and entertaining caricature for white observers could simul-

taneously be a jungle which wielded a great deal of rhetorical power, however con-

tested, as a symbol of African cultural memory for black performers who presented

the jungle on two levels, an ironic one for their spectators and a more authentic one

for themselves.10 A third variation on the idea of doubleness or irony in Ellington s

early jungle style is presented by Graham Lock in Blutopia: Visions of the Future and

Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton.

Lock notes a similar ironic attitude toward jungle style to that discussed by Middleton

and Barg but is more skeptical of any underlying genuine attachment to Africa on

Ellingtons part. In his estimation,

Though important, Ellingtons undermining of primitivist and minstrelsy stereotypeswas secondary to his main purposea more accurate, and positive, portrayal of blacklife in the United States.11

In Locks reading, jungle style jazz had nothing to do with Africa.12 Instead, the

authentic aspect of Ellington hidden beneath an ironic jungle mask was his musical

experimentation, allowed to run wild in an exotic nightclub context.

The chief irony here is that the Cotton Club s jungleskitsplus the various otherexotic location sketches that were featuredreally did enable Ellington, as heclaimed inMusic is My Mistress, to broaden the scope of his music.13

Though these interpretations vary in their suggestions of what Ellingtons subversive

message might have been in the context of an exploitative white power structure,

they are all based in the premise that Ellingtons participation in jungle associations

was controlled by outside forces and on some level resented by the composer

himself.Indeed, after leaving the Cotton Club stage in the 1930s, the word junglemostly

disappeared from the titles of Ellingtons works, a shift that seemed to indicate that the

9Lisa Barg, National Voices/Modernist Histories: Race, Performance and Remembrance in American Music,

19271943,(PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2001), 123.10Ibid., 134.11Lock,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), 102.12

Ibid., 84.13Ibid., 8485.



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composer had broken free from the restrictive and derogatory stereotypes that linked

his music to primitivist notions of Africa.14 Pieces of the musical language that dened

his jungle style, however, remained crucial elements of many of his compositions, and,

decades later, when Ellington again found himself writing African-themed music as a

subset of his numerous pieces and suites based on his world travels, many of the same

sounds that were offered to voyeuristic Cotton Club audiences cropped up again in a

new set of jungle pieces. Like many of Ellingtons later works, his jungle-style pieces

from the late 1960s and early 1970s have received relatively little critical attention.

The existing paradigms discussed above for understanding and contextualizing early

incarnations of jungle style, generally built around Ellingtons navigations of a white-

dominated club, are not well suited to explain the expressive power of later works

like La Plus Belle Africaine, Togo Brava Suite or Afrique from Afro-Eurasian Eclipse

that were dedicated to African countries and audiences rather than his African Amer-

ican peers or white spectators slumming in 1920s Harlem. Although many of the

musical signiers Ellington employs to evoke the jungle in these works are closelytied to the sounds of the Cotton Club, the dramatic shift in their cultural context

over time requires a corresponding shift in our critical understanding of how this

music functions. In addition, coming to terms with late jungle style may alter how

his use of this unique and controversial idiom throughout his career is understood

by demanding acknowledgement of Ellingtons willingness to maintain both the style

and its primitivist associations outside the controlling environment of the 1920s

Harlem nightclub scene.

Before considering Ellingtons late jungle works in detail, examining how his musical

perspective on Africa initially developed will help in establishing the origins of this style.

Ellington showed an interest in writing and performing music from a specically black

perspective throughout his career, at times even giving the impression that he wished to

incorporate traditional musics of the African continent into his own work. In 1930,

journalist Janet Mabie interviewed the up-and-coming jazz composer, exploring his

views on African American music making. She wrote,

There is a point of similarity between Duke Ellington and Paul Robeson. Both believethat in the heart of the Africa a man can travel into today there lies a great secret ofmusic. Both want to go there and nd it. I should think it was possible that one dayboth of them will do it.15

The article, subtitledHarlemsDukeSeeks to Express His Race,paints a picture of a

young Ellington deeply interested in exploring the music of his African ancestors in a

search for the authentic origins of his own musical language. In the context of her dis-

cussion of how he and Robeson were likely to explore Africa and its music, Mabie

quotes him as saying,

14Graham Lock points out that jungle-themed titles were rare even during Ellingtons Cotton Club residency and

that they all but disappeared afterward.Blutopia,8386.15

Janet Mabie, Ellingtons Mood in Indigo: Harlems DukeSeeks to Express His Race,in The Duke EllingtonReader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 43.



7/28

I am just getting a chance to work out some of my own ideas of Negro music Thetragedy is that so few records have been kept of the Negro music of the past. It has tobe pieced together so slowly. But it pleases me to have a chance to work at it.16

From the tone of this early interview, it seems that Ellington was eager to incorporate

native African music into his own work as soon as he had access to more information

on those traditions, a stance implying that early jungle works could simply stand in for

more authentic African compositions until Ellington had access to more detailed

information on the music of his African ancestors.

Over three decades later, however, Ellingtons approach to characterizing Africa

through music still essentially relied of the same imagined rather than discovered

musical signiers of his early jungle pieces. As Ulanov puts it, The Africa of Dukes

music has always echoed more of the Cotton Club junglethan the true African

jungle.17 Ellington was exposed to a variety of musical cultures during a period of

extensive touring in the latter half of his career, nally visiting Africa in addition to

Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Central and South America, and the Soviet Union.18

His travels denitely played a role in his later compositions, which took the form of

a number of programmatic pieces depicting many of the places he visited both in

the U.S. and abroad. Among these works are his Latin American Suite, Afro-Eurasian

Eclipse, Virgin Islands Suite, New Orleans Suite, Far East Suite. Yet, the musical

idioms native to these various locales generally tend to appear as hints or caricatures

rather than direct borrowings.19 Although his memoirs include notes on several indi-

genous musics he learned about during these tours, his own compositional language

tended not to incorporate specic foreign styles. In Penny von Eschens view, Elling-

ton

s international suites bring to light the dif

culty of avoiding both the appropriationand over-simplication of the musical traditions of others when attempting to refer-

ence distant places in song.

Rather than engaging in a colonialist form of appropriation, Ellington wasmining what he heard and saw [during foreign tours] as a way of coming tothink differently about composition. In doing so, however, he sometimes resortedto clichs that reduced the complexity of other peoples music to a few musicalsigniers.20

16

Ibid, 43.17Barry Ulanov, The Ellington Programme, in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Robert OMeally, ed.

(New York, Columbia University Press, 1998), 169.18The Ellington band rst 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

rst of these diplomatic tours was to the Middle East and Southern Asia in 1963, and their nal 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 Suiteas the exception to this trend, writing that it isdifferent from earlier

suites in that it drew on musical materials instead of nonmusical themes and intelligently transformed per-

ceived 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), 167.20

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



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Latin American Suiteprovides a suitable example of the type of stylistic borrowing that

showed up in Ellingtons work. Latin jazz scholar John Storm Roberts describes the

piece as displaying an emotionally impressionist approach to Latin jazz. Although

he sees it as the truest to its sources of Ellingtons Latin compositions, Roberts

goes on to say,

Inspired by a State Department-sponsored tour of South Americathe suite hadrecurring bossa-nova touches that would not have needed a trip to Brazil toacquire, but more frequently the Americanized tango Ellington had been using 40

years earlier.21

Although the compositional language of Latin American Suite does not accurately

reproduce the traditional musics of Brazil or Argentina, Ellingtons description of his

trip to South America conveys a strong interest in the musical culture of the places

he visited, especially in that which is foreign to his own experience. He writes,

There is quite a bit of jazz being exhibited in Brazil by both local and visiting musi-cians, and I really dontneedto hear that, for I hear it every day. I want to hear Bra-zilian musicautntico or genuino.22

Ellington goes on to describe the instruments and musical style of the local people he

hears perform as well as the powerful impression the listening experience had on him.

In a later passage, he states that,Music that is specically Argentinean is discussed and

demonstrated to me by new-found friends,and goes on to delineate the various styles

of tango performed there.23

But Ellingtons interest in or knowledge of indigenous musics of South America did

not translate into a desire to reproduce them while writing his own musical chronicle of

his trip there. In the same way, his manner of evoking images of the jungle changedlittle over the course of his career, even as his knowledge of Africa, its people, and

its music increased over time, and even though he identied himself as a composer

of African music.24 While the imaginatively exotic works of his early career could

be attributed to commercial necessity or a lack of authentic musical sources, these

factors do little to explain similar pieces composed in the 1960s and 70s. By tracing

jungle style through three distinct periods of Ellingtons careerthe origins of jungle

style in Harlem, a middle period of post-Cotton Club work that downplayed jungle

associations, and Ellingtons years of world music-inuenced projects emerging from

his tours during the 1960s and 70s

the implications of this aspect of Ellingtons com-positional language can be examined more fully. Ultimately, not just the Cotton Club,

but also Ellingtons attitude toward Africa, the shifting racial and political situation of

twentieth-century America, and his lifelong nostalgia for the Harlem of his youth all

played a role in shaping jungle style.

21John Storm Roberts,Latin Jazz: The First of the Fusions, 1880s to Today, (New York: Schirmer Books, 1999), 140.22Ellington,Music, 350.23

Ibid, 351.24Ellington,Music, 337.



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Finding the Jungle in Harlem

The phrase Ellingtons jungle style implies an inaccurate historical picture of the

music it describes, indicating that said music either came from the jungle or was

created with the intention of representing it, neither of which is true. Ellington s

jungle style of intensely inected tones by wind playersscreeching woodwinds orvocal-sounding plunger muted brass, for instanceheavy, often low-pitched percus-

sion, and a strong emphasis on blues-derived language was instead cobbled together

from pre-existing aspects of his and his fellow musicians approach to composition

and performance.25 Along with the more jazz-specic devices mentioned above, Elling-

ton also employed types of generalized exoticism popular in classical or Tin Pan Alley

works such as drones, open fths, pentatonic or non-western scales, folk-like melodic

simplicity, extreme registers, dissonance, ostinato, and a general tendency toward

minor keys in the pieces he used in conjunction with jungle themes.26 Just like the

Americanized bossa nova and tango elements found in Ellingtons Latin American

Suite, all the ingredients of jungle style could be found in the United States.

Although he did not travel to a jungle to do so, Ellington did in fact discover music

that was unfamiliar to him and adopt it into his own compositional language in works

that would eventually be tied to Africa at the Cotton Club. The jungle style is a perfect

example of how Ellington often found new musical ideas: from the musicians with

whom he worked. The Ellington orchestra began to set itself apart from other

popular dance bands of the day through the incorporation of trumpeter Bubber

Mileys rougher, bluesier approach to performance, tending toward what was

dubbed ahotrather than asweetstyle. Ellington acknowledged Mileys importance

in this development, saying Bubber used to growl all night long, playing gutbucket onhis horn. That was when we decided to forget all about the sweet music.27

Signicantly, Ellingtons collaborations with Miley began before his efforts to create

a jungle atmosphere for shows at the Cotton Club. The two men, along with another

important gure in the bands development of a characteristic sound, trombonist Joe

Tricky SamNanton, started working together four years earlier at a downtown venue

called the Kentucky Club. As Ellington recalls in his 1973 autobiography,

It was at the Kentucky Club that our music acquired new colors and characteristics We got Bubber Miley, the epitome of soul and a master with the plunger mute Joe

Tricky Sam

Nanton came in, and he and Bubber became a great team, workinghand in glove. They made a ne art out of what became known as jungle style, estab-lishing a tradition we still maintain today.28

It is important to note that Ellington describes here a style that became known as

jungle style. While reviews of the bands performances at the Kentucky Club often

allude to the musicians race in conjunction with their hot and bluesy style, they

25See, for instance, Mimi Clar, The Style of Duke Ellington, in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 303311.26Middleton, Musical Belongings,72.27

Quoted by Nat Shapiro and Nat Henthoff, eds., Hear Me Talkinto Ya (London: Peter Davies, 1955), 231.28Ellington,Music, 7172.



10/28

in no specic way relate the music to the African continent.29 The musical signiers

that would later be tied to representations of the African jungle were well established

by the band prior to the onset of such associations.

As Richard Middleton points out, examples of jungle style exist from as early as 1924,

three years before the bands residency at the Cotton Club began.30 Miley and Elling-

tons opening statement on East St. Louis Toodle-Oo (Ex. 1), recorded in 1926 before

Ellingtons move to the Cotton Club, demonstrates the primary characteristics of the

style quite well. After an introduction in which low-register half-note chords in C-

minor in the saxophones and tuba set an ominous mood, Miley enters with the

folk-like melody in a simple, triadic style. His added inections in the form of

growls and a plunger mute, as well as the use of the atted fth of the key as a dissonant

blue note against tonic chords in measure 13 further develop the works blues atmos-

phere. Retrospectively, the work can be associated with the jungle pieces Ellington

wrote several years later. East St. Louis Toodle-Oosprogrammatic title, however, ties

Example 1 East St. Louis Toodle-Oo, mm. 116. Duke Ellington, Early Ellington: The

Complete Brunswick and Vocalion Recordings of Duke Ellington, 1926-1931 GRP

GRD-3-640, 1994, compact discs. Transcription by Michael Frederick.

29SeeThe Washingtonians: First New York Review (1923)andReviews from the Kentucky Club (1925)inThe

Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).30Middleton, Musical Belongings,72.



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it to a known urban and domestic space, not an unseen foreign and wild one, at a time

when Ellington had not yet set out to musically depict the jungle.

Ellingtons jungle style, then, is a collaborative style developed in conjunction with

members of his orchestra and made up of a set of musical signs that did not initially

stand for Africa but rather constituted their own musical language as African Ameri-

cans from a variety of geographic and cultural backgrounds. When hired to write a

musical accompaniment for a staged Africa at the Cotton Club a year later, Ellington

called on the preexisting bits of his musical vocabulary rather than invent a new

idiom, and hot, bluesy, urban style became jungle style. The shows at the Cotton

Club were closely linked to variety, burlesque, and vaudeville theater practices of the

era, and a version of the minstrelsy-based racial stereotypes that still permeated

these genres was easily applied to Ellingtons music by presenting it as the soundscape

of a wild and primitive jungle for white visitors to Harlem. As Thomas Riis describes in

his work on turn-of-the-century black musical theater, the legacy of minstrelsy played a

signicant role in the style of the New York City entertainment scene into which Elling-ton stepped in the early 1920s.31

Whether from genuine contentment or because of his consistently positive public

persona, Ellington also avoided commenting on any negative feelings brought about

by the way his music at the Cotton Club was promoted. Although jungle-styled

black performers were presented in a white-owned, white-patronized club, decorated

to look like a plantation in which white authority contained black wildness, Ellington

focused on the positive aspects of the establishment when describing his experiences

there in his memoirs. He remembered fondly how focused the audience was on the per-

formance. The Cotton Club was a classy spot, he said. Impeccable behavior was

demanded in the room while the show was on.32 Ellington was thus able to write

music intended for listening, not only for dancing. Ellingtons orchestra was also fea-

tured on nightly radio broadcasts of the clubs shows, making his the rst African

American band to have regular national radio broadcasts, and, as Chadwick Jenkins

suggests, the Cotton Club theme of safely contained exoticism played an important

role in allowing Ellington to present over the airwaves music that sounded so unabash-

edly different from popular white bands like that of Paul Whiteman.33 Upon ending his

engagement at the Cotton Club, Ellington left behind an employment situation that

mandated regular associations between his music and primitivized, sexualized jungle

images but kept his growing popularityand the palette of sounds that made upjungle style.

Within the context of the Cotton Club, the idea of jungle style as potentially ironic is,

as scholars like Lock, Barg, and Middleton have demonstrated, thoroughly supportable.

Where this line of interpretation becomes more difcult to sustain, however, is the

point at which Ellington left the Cotton Club in 1931. Ellington continued to write

31Thomas L. Riis,Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 18901915(Washington and London: Smith-

sonian Institution Press, 1989).32Ellington,Music, 80.33

Chadwick Jenkins,A Question of Containment: Duke Ellington and Early Radio,American Musicvol. 26, no. 4(Winter 2008), 415441.



12/28

in this styleand verbally relate it to Africa and the junglefor the remainder of his

life, long after he left the restrictive, stereotype-laden Harlem nightclub scene behind.

Lock asserts thatThere is no evidence that Ellington either initiated or was particularly

enthusiastic about the junglelabel being attached to his music.34 Perhaps this is true

of the Cotton Club era, but any controlling outside force that impels Ellington to intro-

duce a movement ofTogo Brava Suitein a 1971 performance by saying, And now, into

the jungle!is much more difcult to see than the power structures that he had to navi-

gate forty years earlier.35 Continuing to trace the historical path of jungle style shows

that Ellington did not choose to permanently distance himself from the associations

made between music and a primitivized, imaginative Africa that emerged early in his

career, and a sense of the ironic distance scholars describe in his early performances

grows less clear in the new contexts in which Ellington found himself.

Recasting the Jungle in the Concert Hall

By the 1930s, Ellington began to draw attention from critics for more than just his

orchestras unique renditions of popular and original tuneshe also began to be recog-

nized as a composer. A line of criticism initiated by R. D. Darrell in a 1932 magazine

typicallylled with classical music reviews started a lasting trend of comparing Elling-

ton to the great composers of the western classical canon. Darrell is not shy in these

associations, as in the course of a single article he manages to liken the Duke to

Delius, Wagner, Stravinsky, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and, of course, Bach.36 Dar-

rells writing, peppered with German words for an extra measure of classical-music

authority, praises Ellington for such typically valued classical traits as compositionalunity and counterpoint. He also describes Ellington as more akin to white than

black composers because of his voice and identity as an individual artist.

Where the music of his race has heretofore been a communal, anonymous creation,he breaks the way to the individuals who are coming to sum it up in one voice, creat-ing personally and consciously out of the measureless store of racial urge forexpression.37

This notion that Ellington expresses black feeling in the manner of a white composer

would be revisited frequently in the following decades. The music that had represented

the jungle a few years earlier now slid to the background of both Ellingtons presen-tation of himself and the reception of his works.

The reception of EllingtonsKo-Ko, recorded in 1940, offers a useful example of how

he was given the artistic credibility of a classical composer whose former jungle style

simply added touches of African American authenticity to pieces that were promoted

and reviewed as jazz works of art. As early as 1930, Ellington began expressing an

34Ibid., 82.35Duke Ellington,Togo Brava Suite, United Artists Records UXS-92, 1974, LPs.36R. D. Darrell, Black Beauty,in in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1993), 5765.37Ibid., 64.



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interest in writing a large-scale concert work that related the history of the African

American community. In an article for the New York Evening Graphic Magazine, Flor-

ence Zunser reported,

At present he is at work on a tremendous task, the writing, in music, ofThe History

of the Negro,

taking the Negro from Egypt, going with him to savage Africa, andfrom there to the sorrow and slavery of Dixie, and nallyhome to Harlem.38

The work discussed here was a proposed opera entitled Boola. While the opera never

materialized, music from Ellingtons sketches for the work appeared in other forms.

The bulk of the music, along with the latter part of the narrative, was used for a

concert piece premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943,Black, Brown, and Beige.39 Ellingtons

original conception for the opera involved four scenes, the rst in Africa, and the sub-

sequent three in the New World, but the African portion was dropped by the time the

rest of the narrative was completed as a Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in

America.40

Ko-Ko,a shorter independent piece released a few years earlier, may wellconsist of the music originally written for Boolas African introduction. While its

specic programmatic meaning is not clear, Barry Ulanov states that the musical

material ofKo-Ko is drawn from the unnished score to Boola, and its use of jungle

style seems likely to have been intended to accompany a scene of Africans in their

native home.41

Ko-Komakes extensive use of musical elements characteristic of jungle style. Blues

inuence is clear, as the bulk of the work is built over repetitions of a standard twelve-

bar blues in E-at minor, the only exceptions being a harmonically static introduction

and coda (Ex. 2). The jungle toposis established at the outset by the use of low tom

toms, a feature that returns in the coda to close the piece. Another primitivistmusical element that occurs in both the introduction and in the coda is a drone, a

tonic pedal point held by the baritone saxophone. The drone introduces the primary

rhythmic motive of the piece as an ostinato before it is picked up in a more melodic

fashion by the trombone at the start of the rst chorus. In the second full chorus,

the composed trombone melody is replaced by the wailing of Nantons vocal,

plunger-muted sound in an improvised solo that strengthens the works associations

with Ellingtons earlier jungle pieces (Ex. 3).

Ko-Ko gained the admiration of classical music critics, but not for its wild jungle

imagery. Instead, Andr Hodeir, a French critic trained in classical composition atthe Paris Conservatoire, hailedKo-Koas a masterpiece of motivically developed absol-

ute music that just happened to be in the jungle style, an emblem of sophistication

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), 6786.40Ibid., 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

gure relates to a percussive leitmotif that ties Black, Brown, and Beigeto a handwritten sketch ofBoola. SeeThe Genesis,142.



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rather than primitivism.42 Hodeir helped solidify the image of Ellington as a skilled

artist and composer. His rst essay on the subject, a chapter from 1954, is focused

on Concerto for Cootie, a work which he refers to as along with Ko-Ko, the most

Example 2Introduction toKo-Ko. Duke Ellington,The Blanton-Webster BandBluebird

5659-2-RB, 1986, compact disc. Transcription by David Berger.

42Ellingtons large-scale concert works, beginning withReminiscing in Tempoof 1935, have been the source of con-

siderable 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 basedon their own independent aesthetic criteria.



15/28

important composition that Duke Ellington has turned out.43 Hodeir uses his analysis

to make a case for Ellington as an important composer, situating Ellington against the

backdrop of western art music as Darrell had. In order to demonstrate the works worth

as a composition, he focuses his discussion on aspects of the music that reect standard

Example 3 Chorus 1 of Joe Nantons solo on Ko-Ko. Duke Ellington, The Blanton-

Webster BandBluebird 5659-2-RB, 1986, compact disc. Transcription by David Berger.

43

Andr Hodeir,A Masterpiece:Concerto for Cootie,inThe Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York:Oxford University Press, 1993), 277.



16/28

western classical musical values, such as Ellingtons clever reshaping of a conventional

form, his economic use of motivic material, and his harmonic techniques. He con-

cludes by saying,

In the perfection of its form and the quality of its ideas, theConcerto, which combines

classicism and innovation, stands head and shoulders above other pieces played bybig bands. It has almost all the good features found in the best jazz, and othersbesides that are not generally found in Negro music. It makes up for the elementsit doesnt use by the admirable way in which it exploits those that constitute itsreal substance. Isnt that exactly what a masterpiece is supposed to do?44

Hodeir validates Ellington as an artist, but he does so by showing his similarity to white

composers and the ways in which he differs from other black musicians.

Although Hodeir does not apply the same level of close analysis to Ko-Ko that he

does to theConcerto, he clearly holds it in the same high esteem, declaring its compo-

sition to mark the rst time that anyone had reallywritten for a jazz orchestra and

referring to it as the most perfect example of Duke Ellingtons language and oneof the undisputed masterpieces of orchestral jazz.45 Through this logic, Hodeir

takes a piece that Ellington appears to have conceived as a representation of pre-colo-

nial Africa and makes it a symbol of Ellingtons kinship to western art music. This cer-

tainly makes for an interesting reversal considering that Ko-Ko may have been the

section of music removed from Boola in the creation of Ellingtons statement of

racial identity inBlack, Brown, and Beige. The remaining three sections formed a pro-

gressive trajectory away from slavery and toward urban modernity, focusing completely

on an African American story. Although some of the sonic indicators of jungle style are

present inBlack, Brown, and Beige, associations with the literal jungle are not, and thenarrative content tied to the music presented a very different picture of African Amer-

icans than the context of the Cotton Club had. As Mark Tucker describes,Black, Brown,

and Beigehad adidactic, consciousness-raising functionin its programmatic material

rather than an exploitative, entertainment-based one.46 If it were not for a later return

to the use of jungle style in direct association with Africa itself, it might appear that

Ellington had indeed chosen to sever the connection between emotional, bluesy sim-

plicity and exotic notions of the African continent that were formed in his early

career in favor of redening those elements of his music as part of a compositional

style that reected his African American identity but signied high art rather than

low, primitive entertainment.This change in how the sounds of Ellingtons band were understood is reected in

John Howlands work on Ellingtons more symphonic or long-form pieces of this era,

includingBlack, Brown, and Beige. The jungle style elements that once made Ellingtons

band a wild spectacle now furnished the touches that maintained the connection

44Ibid., 288.45Andr Hodeir, Why Did Ellington RemakeHis Masterpiece?,inThe 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.



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between what were seen by many as his masterful, artistic compositions and the hot jazz

that represented his African American musical origins.

The critical reception of Duke Ellingtons music in the 1930s and 1940s reveals agradual shift in the ideological basis of symphonic jazz away from its Whitemanesque

roots in (white) New York entertainment toward the hope of a

serious

concertwork idiom based on the elevation of authentic,African American hot jazz.47

What used to be jungle style became, in the context of Ellingtons work of the 1930s and

40s, the sound of authenticity that kept him tied to the African American jazz tradition

as he moved farther in the direction of art music composer. Indeed, efforts by critics to

frame Ellington as a serious artist after the band left the Cotton Club were matched by

the promotional work of both the composer himself and his manager Irving Mills.

According to Howland, Mills astutely sought to advance Ellingtons career by

raising him rung-by-rung up a ladder of prestigious accomplishments, all with an

eye to maintaining the dignied persona that Ellington had long cultivated.48 They

sought to shift the balance of Ellingtons public persona, pulling his cultural image

away from its ties to the African jungle and toward new associations with western clas-

sical composers. As Cohen puts it, After the Cotton Club engagement allowed the

band to make strides into the broad white market, geniussupplanted jungleas the

key term.49 While jungle material remained very much a part of Ellingtons compo-

sitional style, Ellington and his management sought to reduce its primitivistic associ-

ations. An advertising manual for promotion of the orchestra from 1931 reads as

follows:

DUKE ELLINGTON and His Famous Orchestra is the correct billing for this organ-ization. It is true that this organization won its reputation at the Cotton Club inHarlem in New York, but do not refer to it as the Cotton Club orchestra, whichis confusing. It is okay, however, to refer to the Cotton Club engagement in storiesor advertisements, not forgetting that Ellington and his band also were featured inFlorenz Ziegfelds musical comedy, Show Girl; in the motion picture Check andDouble Check,with Amos and Andy, and with Maurice Chevalier in his rst broad-way personal appearance. An excellent personal catch line of copy for Duke Ellingtonhimself is: Harlems Aristocrat of Jazz.50

Along with these instructions for the promotion of Ellington as a performer, sheet

music and recordings of the band were advertised by Mills as the creations of an artistic

genius. As Cohen describes,

Advertisements for an Ellington song tended to equate the song with lasting quality,as ifit was like a gem,explained Paul Mills, Irvings son who worked in the familybusiness starting in the 1930s. Again! the stamp of Ellington genius!claims

47John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz(Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 2009), p. 5.48Ibid., p. 39.49Harvey G. Cohen,The Marketing of Duke Ellington: Setting the Strategy for an African American Maestro,The

Journal of African American Historyvol. 89, no. 4 (Autumn, 2004), 299.50

Advertising Manual: Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra(1931) quoted in Cohen, The Marketing ofDuke Ellington,299300.



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one 1935 ad, while another from the previous year proclaimed Ellington as ave stargenius.51

The increase in these types of ads during the 1930s is particularly notable considering

that Ellington began the decade with newspaper descriptions like this one released

during his

nal year in full-time residence at the Cotton Club. In a 1931 article announ-cing Ellingtons victory in a national contest in which he was crowned the King of

Jazz,a writer for thePittsburgh Courierdeclared that,His jungle rhythm and barbaric

interpretations are in the heydey of delight and fascination.52 The jungle barbarism

that was central to interpretations of Ellington in the Cotton Club era would fade into

the background over the next few years.

As he began touring nationally in the 1930s, Ellington was careful to maintain a

respectable public image. With the aid of Millsmanagement, members of Ellingtons

ensemble presented themselves in a manner that was somewhat rare for African Amer-

ican jazz groups of the time. In addition to advertising that presented a rened picture

of Ellington and his sidemen, they performed immaculately dressed, sporting tuxedosfor concerts, and traveled by private Pullman with their own stage, lighting equipment,

and electrician.53 The band exuded an air of quality and professionalism that noticeably

set them apart from their peers, and their central gure was Ellington the artist-com-

poser. As Cohen describes,

The Mills organizations marketing of Ellington differed from that of other songwri-ters, performers, or bands, African American or white, in its overarching insistenceon portraying Ellington as an important American composer and as a genius, anartist whose work and demeanor should be associated with the values of quality

and respectability. They intimated that Ellington uplifted, as well as entertained audi-ences. Such strategies shielded Ellington and the orchestra from being associated withthe degrading contemporary images of Jim Crow segregation. Particularly from theearly 1930s forward, the Ellington image served as a stark counterpoint to the buf-foonish and decadent stereotypes that usually accompanied African Americancareers in popular music.54

Although Ellington had relied on calling his music jungle musicto achieve popularity

in the twenties, in the thirties, forties, and earlyfties, styling it as the art of a genius

composer like that of the western art tradition proved more useful. The aspects of

his music that had been considered exotically African and were so important to its

early reception took on a less prominent position in considerations of Ellingtonswork during the middle of the twentieth century in deference to his more classical

characteristics.

Looking back on Ellingtons work in the 1930s in a 1956 essay, Gunther Schuller

described him as, in those days always years ahead of his time and the masterly

51Cohen, The Marketing of Duke Ellington,301.52Floyd G. Snelson, Story of Duke Ellingtons Rise to Kingship of Jazz Reads Like Fiction,The Duke Ellington

Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 55.53

Cohen, The Marketing of Duke Ellington,295.54Ibid., 296.



19/28

precursor of so many innovations in common use today.55 Although Schuller here

refers specically to Ellingtons advanced compositional techniques and use of

musical form, Cohen suggests that the master composer image Ellington developed

beginning in the thirties through both his music and his presentation of it was

nearly unprecedented for a black artist, making him a prominent leader for not

just musicians, but for African Americans and Americans more broadly.56 Maintaining

the momentum of his career success and popularity during the thirties and forties

would prove difcult for Ellington, however. Cohen notes,

In the postwar era, American culture, especially African American culture and atti-tudes toward civil rights, was changing. A new generation was emerging, and ittook time for Ellington to adjust to and nally master these new realities.57

At mid-century, Ellington found himself no longer at the cutting edge of the jazz world,

in part because of the changing ways that African American musicians chose to navigate

issues of race.

Celebrating the Jungle in Africa

By 1950, a younger generation of prominent jazz musicians and shifting attitudes about

racial injustice that intensied in the years following World War II were again signi-

cantly changing the context in which Duke Ellingtons music was heard. Ingrid

Monson has documented a gradual move from, a colorblind ideology on race

within the jazz community to the assertion of a black-identied consciousness on

the part of many African American musicians and their supporters during the1950s and 60s.58 Each signicant event in the Civil Rights Movement elicited a

response from the jazz community. For example, Charles Mingus criticized through

music Arkansas Governor Orval Faubuss attempt to stop public school desegregation

in his Fables of Faubuswritten in 1957, and even the normally apolitical Louis Arm-

strong publicly spoke out about the injustice of the Little Rock Crisis. The student

lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 were saluted in the cover photo for Max Roachs

Freedom Now Suite, one of several jazz compositions of that directly participated in

the African American struggle for equality. Another, John Coltranes Alabama,

honored the four young victims of the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963.

For African American jazz musicians of the fties and sixties, not being involved in

the Civil Rights Movement in one way or another would have been extremely difcult.

Many players participated in benet concerts for civil rights groups, and they also began

increasingly to stand up against unfair treatment in the music business itself. As

Monson notes,

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 Ellingtons America(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 4.57Ibid., 272.58

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



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If in the mid-1940s playing with a mixed band was taken as a sign of a progressiveracial attitude, by the mid-1950s a performer had to refuse to play to segregated audi-ences to meet the rising moral standards of the civil rights movement.59

The response of jazz musicians to civil rights issues came not just in words and actions,

but also in their aesthetic approach to music. As Monson argues, efforts to dene jazz as

a black music formed a signicant trend.

In response to the commercial and popular success of white jazz musicians, whichwas viewed by many as depriving African American musicians of a fair economicreturn on their creativity, many African American jazz musicians of the 1950s and1960s seemed determined to emphasize and develop black difference rather thanwitness a repeat of the 1930s, when Benny Goodman was crowned the King ofSwing.60

Garnering the same levels of success and respect as widely known white musicians no

longer represented achievement or progress for the African American jazz artist,

because much of the energy previously devoted to asserting that jazz was worthy ofthe concert hall shifted toward presenting jazz as a uniquely African American expres-

sive form.61

While Ellington participated in fundraisers for the NAACP and the historic March

on Washington and continued to compose works with themes of racial uplift like My

People(1963), he was by no means at the forefront of civil rights activism among jazz

musicians of the fties and sixties. In fact, he was among those criticized in the black

press for continuing to perform in front of segregated audiences.62 A trend that Elling-

ton did participate in, however, was the move toward greater acknowledgement of a

signi

cant relationship between jazz and Africa, a link that would be, according toMonson, increasingly viewed as a crucial cultural connection as the civil rights

movement intensied in the early 1960s.63 While for some, like pianist Randy

Weston and drummer Ed Blackwell, evoking this connection involved direct links to

African music, for Ellington it meant a return to the use of jungle style in the

context of pieces with African titles or themes.

When Ellington and his orchestra were invited to participate in the rst World Fes-

tival of Negro Arts in 1966, the piece that he wrote to represent himself in his rst

59Ibid., 61.60

Ibid., 106.61The writings of Amiri Baraka, Albert Murray, John Gennari, Eric Porter, and many others explore the signi-

cance of jazz as a medium for specically 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 Perspectiveed. 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], 251298). Despite his con-

sistent presence as a performer at this time, mentions of the social or political signicance of Ellingtons later work

are rare in these discussions, perhaps because of his status as more of a living legend than an avant-garde gure by

the 1960s.62

Ibid., 133.63Ibid., 151.



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performance on the African continent is quite rich in the exotic signiers of his jungle

style. La Plus Belle Africaine, conceived as a musical portrait of a beautiful African

woman, strongly resembles Ko-Ko in its musical material. For instance, it shares the

same key, E-at minor, and the same strategy of opening and closing the piece with

a harmonically static section that highlights a rhythmic ostinato. Again, the rst full-

ensemble melody is heard over a twelve-bar blues progression, and a strongly blues-

inected solo voice, this time a clarinet, again offers reminders of the origins of

jungle style in Miley and Nantons improvisations of the mid-twenties.

In addition to its similarities to Ko-Ko,La Plus Belle Africainecontains an impressive

amount of generally exotic musical language representative of the non-west. In the

opening ostinato (Ex. 4), for example, the piano plays parallel open fths in a very

low register that alternate with interjections by the double bass in an unusually high

register. This exchange of standard tessituras and use of non-triadic sonorities marks

the piece as unusual from the start. The rst voice to join the rhythm section, a solo

clarinet, outlines that classic musical indicator of the non-west, the pentatonic scale,in this case in E-at minor decorated by the addition of occasional chromatic neigh-

bors. In the context of Ellingtons oeuvre, which includes such complexities as the

fast, bebop-like lines, rich chromatic harmonies, complex counterpoint, and creative

use of form of pieces like The Tattooed Bride (1950), the main melody of La Plus

Belle Africaine is incredibly simple. Over one chorus of a 12-bar minor blues pro-

gression, the full wind section plays the same four-bar unison gure three times

Example 4 Introduction to La Plus Belle Africaine. Duke Ellington, Togo Brava Suite,

United Artists Records UXS-92, 1974, LPs. Transcription by Bill Dobbins.



22/28

(Ex. 5). As in the clarinet introduction, the melody is drawn primarily from a penta-

tonic collection with one elaborating chromatic pitch. Throughout the piece, Ellington

tends to avoid his usual thick harmonic textures and developmental tactics that could

be read as his closest connections to European-style musical sophistication.

Example 5Opening melodic statement ofLa Plus Belle Africaine. Duke Ellington,Togo

Brava Suite,United Artists Records UXS-92, 1974, LPs. Transcription by Bill Dobbins.



23/28

La Plus Belle Africaine, in addition to its jungle style and exotic content, shows signs

of Ellington reaching out to a changing African American audience in its references to

contemporary popular styles. The most signicant departure from early jungle works

apparent in this piece comes in Rufus Jones vigorous, funk-inected drumming.

The straight-eight groove that accompanies the main melody ofLa Plus Belle Africaine,

along with prominent drum lls between melodic phrases, gives a nod to rock, R & B,

and funk that characterizes several of Ellingtons compositions from the late sixties and

early seventies.La Plus Bellesclosest relative in this respect may beBlue Pepperfrom the

Far East Suite, another Rufus Jones feature in which the wind section plays loud unison

gures between lls in a straight-eight context. Along similar lines,Thanks for the Beau-

tiful Land on the Deltafrom theNew Orleans Suiteuses a strong Motown-like backbeat

andAmadfrom the Far East Suitehas a boogaloo feel.

Yet, the parts ofLa Plus Belle Africainethat seem to stand most clearly for Africa

remain closely tied to the jungle pieces of the 1920s. Certainly, Ellington employed

blues inection, melodic and harmonic simplicity, vigorous percussion, and otheraspects of jungle style in numerous works that had no direct connection to Africa,

but when he did seek to programmatically evoke Africa, these musical markers

occur with remarkable consistency. For example, Afrique from Afro-Eurasian Eclipse

emphasizes drumming through the use of a repetitive tom-tom gure and prominently

features pitch bends by clarinets and saxophones as well as plunger-muted trom-

bones.64 Afriquealso shares with La Plus Bellea melody constructed from numerous

repetitions of short, simple gures and minimal harmonization in the wind voicings.

InRhythm Pum Te DumfromA Drum is a Woman, Africa is evoked in the works Car-

ibbean and American narrative through lyrics that tell us rhythm came to America

from Africa, and extensive use of drums again link jungle style to African

imagery.65 Naturellementfrom Togo Brava Suitealso makes use of Ellingtons classic

jungle signiers in a work that he verbally tied to the jungle in performances, reinfor-

cing a relationship between the features that had dened jungle style for decades and

suggestions of Africa.

While many of its sounds could be traced to his early career, Ellingtons description

of his 1966 premiere ofLa Plus Belle Africaine, his rst performance in Africa after

writing African music for thirty-ve years, reveals a response to his jungle style

music as different from what it received in the late twenties as the Cotton Club was

from Dakar.66

He recalled the event as follows:

When the time for our concert comes, it is a wonderful successWhen we are n-ished, [the audience] shout[s] approval and dash[es] for backstage, where they hugand embrace us, some of them with tears in their eyes. It is acceptance at thehighest level, and it gives us a once-in-a-lifetime feeling of having truly brokenthrough to our brothers.67

64Duke Ellington,The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, Fantasy 9498, 1975, LP.65Duke Ellington,A Drum is a Woman, Columbia 951, 1956, LP.66

Ellington,Music, 337.67Ibid., 337338.



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Ellington performed in Senegal as an inspirational example of an artist of African heri-

tage who had achieved international success and worldwide fame. In this context a

symbol of the wealthy, sophisticated, urban west, Ellington chose to use much of the

same musical language in representing the United States to Africa as he had fty

years earlier in representing Africa to the United States. The same signiers that had

widened the cultural gap between himself and white audiences in his Harlem home,

framing himself and his fellow performers as strange objects in a foreign spectacle,

here are described as drawing Ellington closer to the entire African Diaspora.

Signicantly, the sounds he used to convey his sense of belonging to a common

African heritage, despite their exotic nature in the Cotton Club and acceptance at

the World Festival of Negro Arts, were native to African American communities, not

African ones. As Graham Lock wryly puts it, in describing one of the keys to jungle

style as being the plumbers everyday rubber plunger, Ellington was referring to

an everyday implement in Harlem, that is, but presumably not so in jungle life.68

Ellingtons contribution to highlighting the importance of African heritage in jazzduring the sixties and seventies was to revive associations between his compositional

style and an imagined ancestral home in the jungle that were thrust upon him

earlier in his career. While many of his younger colleagues in the jazz world were ght-

ing against connections to stereotypical black entertainers of white audiences, Ellington

was in effect reclaiming his early years playing the primitive to white onlookers as an

element of his African American identity that he could, by the 1960s, control himself.

Togo Brava Suitedemonstrates the way in which Ellington recast material reminis-

cent of the Cotton Club years in an African context later in life. It was written as a

gesture of appreciation to the Togolese Republic when it included Ellington s picture

in a series of postage stamps featuring various composers, the other three being

Bach, Beethoven, and Debussy.69 According to biographer Derek Jewell, Ellington

requested a great deal of information about the country, inquiring after everything

from its history to its fertility until a package of notes and other material was sent

by express air-freight to America.70 It is difcult to say exactly how Ellingtons

research inuenced the four-movement suite he eventually recorded in 1971, but the

vision of Togo conveyed in the piece bears some striking similarities to the jungles

of the Cotton Club.71 As described by Ellington scholar Stefano Zenni,

The structure in four movements [rather than the original seven] made it easier forEllington to nd an underlying narrativeto which the author also referred when

68Lock,Blutopia, p. 84.69Stefano Zenni, The Aesthetics of Duke Ellingtons Suites: The Case of Togo Brava Black Music Research

Journalvol. 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 Ellingtons 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

works premiere. In October of the same year, the suite was recorded at a live performance in Bristol, England.

This recording was released on Ellingtons record,Togo Brava Suite, and this is the version of the work I consider

here (United Artists UXS-92, 1971). After Ellingtons death, all seven movements from the June recording sessionwere released (Storyville STCD8323, 2001).



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presenting the work in concert: the rst movement, relaxed and evocative, describesarriving on the silvery shores of Togo; the vigorous blues with a powerful nale,Naturellement, stands for moving into the jungle (the words that Ellingtonspoke into the microphone were And now into the jungle!); Amour, Amour,the classical third movement, mysterious and seductive, symbolizes discovering

woman in the heart of the jungle, a theme recurrent since the days of the CottonClub; Right on Togois the joyful closing gospel, celebrating the return to civiliza-tion of modern-day Togo.72

Even without the verbal description of this piece, the choice of exotic signiers Elling-

ton uses in each movement creates a narrative that bears a striking similarity to a story

Ellington told many other times when African Americans, not Africans, were his

subject. The rst movement is in an Afro-Caribbean style, featuring a prominent

two-three son clavepattern. The second movement is in jungle style, containing wild

heterophony, vigorous drumming, muted brass growls, and a blues form. The third

movement offers clichs of the sexualized foreign woman with the same kind of mean-

dering chromatic lines one might encounter in an exotic opera like BizetsCarmenorRimsky-Korsakovs The Golden Cockerel. These three exoticized movements are then

contrasted by a clear evocation of gospel style, bringing us solidly back from our

various adventures to sultry beaches and hyper-sexualized jungles to the representation

of the modern, civilized, and Christian west through the use of an African American

religious topos. This destination, both up-to-date and spiritual certainly reects Elling-

tons other late worksTogo Bravawas recorded between the second and third Sacred

Concertsbut what does it have to say about the largely agrarian country of Togo in

which Christianity was a minority religion?

While Togo Brava was designed to apply to an African context, its similarities toEllingtons representation of African American musical narratives are notable. Elling-

tons portrayal of Togo shares the same primitive to modern, rural to urban trajectory

of his sketches forBoolaandBlack, Brown, and Beige. Mark Tucker traces the origins of

Ellingtons basic storyline beginning in the jungle and moving from slavery to eman-

cipation to Harlem to his exposure to both educational history programs put on by

the African American community in Washington, D.C. and more entertainment-

based shows in the theaters and nightclubs of New York, such as Lew Leslies revue,

Dixie to Broadway from 1924. Similar storylines had been in use since late nine-

teenth-century minstrel shows and made their way into more serious works like

William Grant StillsDarker AmericaandAfro-American Symphonybefore the eventual

completion ofBlack, Brown, and Beigein 1943.73 As John Howland describes in detail

in Ellington Uptown, triumphant or optimistic portrayals of Harlem remained main-

stays of Ellingtons programmatic works throughout his life. Even after overcrowding,

poverty, racism, and rioting had severely tarnished the Harlem Ellington arrived in

during his youth, his musical tributes to the neighborhood like the 1950 Tone Parallel

to Harlemcontinued to focus on positive themes. Howland points out that,

72

Zenni, The Aesthetics of Duke Ellingtons Suites,20.73Tucker, The Origins ofBlack, Brown, and Beige, 6972.



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Harlems cross-racial entertainment business died altogether after the 1943 riot, andthe neighborhoods fortunes continued to decline until its rock-bottom lows in the1970s and 1980s. That Ellington composed Black, Brown, and Beige and NewWorld A-Cominhis two earliest tone parallels to Harlemwithin roughly a

year following the 1943 race riots underscores his steadfast optimism and pride in

what Harlem had once represented to his generation.

74

In Right On Togo, Ellington essentially shifts his hopeful vision for Harlem as a pro-

gressive black metropolis with more churches than cabaretsfrom an African Amer-

ican context to that of a newly independent African nation, just as he, in the preceding

three movements, applied scenes from a 1920s Harlem nightclub show to the actual

landscapes of African beaches and jungles.75

The resemblance between the picture of Africans created at the end of Ellingtons

career and the one offered up to titillate white audiences forty years prior is striking,

and it begs a more broad consideration of Ellingtons jungles. In the late 1920s, the

primary factor that separated jungle-style works from Ellington

s other pieces was audi-ence. It was the expectations of white viewers and listeners that contextualized the

sounds of the urban, modern Ellington orchestra as exotic and primitive rather than

strikingly novel and uniquely American. This complex context for jungle style has

rightly received the attention of scholars like Lock, Middleton, and Barg who have

shown how primitivist 1920s jungle imagery could provide a mask that covered Elling-

tons truer ideas or emotions about Africa and race, whether they be expressed with

bitter irony, a knowing smile, or an underlying sense of belonging and pride in a

broad Diasporic community. Jungle-style pieces that he composed of his own volition

for actual African audiences at the end of his career do not t neatly within the same

analytical frame, however, because the social, political, and economic forces thatsupport and explain these analyses were no longer at work in the same ways. As Eric

Porter describes, the Ellington of the 1920s and 30s tried to dene a socially relevant

black aesthetic under conditions that limited black creativity.76 He was pushing up

against the outer limits of musical modernity and racial expectations, and, in part

because of his work, those limits began to change. With works like La Plus Belle Afri-

caine and Togo Brava, the fundamental change in Ellingtons audience, nationally,

racially, and historically, demands an equally profound shift in interpretation, a shift

that raises questions that may be more unsettling than the answers analyses of early

jungle style alone can provide. Does Ellingtons use of jungle style in Dakar in 1966appeal to the entire Diaspora of black artists at the festival to embrace outdated primi-

tive stereotypes as a part of their heritage by stepping behind the mask with him? The

narrative ofTogo Bravaalso begs consideration, as it could be seen as presenting young

African nations as primitive and backward, awaiting progressive modernist develop-

ment that would create a continent of new Harlems. The question of how Ellington

saw the wildness and simplicity of jungle styleas an authentic part of himself and

74Howland,Ellington Uptown, 13.75Ellington quoted by Howland,Ellington Uptown, 290.76

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



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his heritage, or as a portrait of people he presented as fundamentally different from

himselfalso seems relevant in light of late African-themed pieces.

There is no doubt that Ellingtons work at the Cotton Club was shaped by its racially

charged context or that he worked to improve the position of African Americans

throughout his career. His willingness to continue to compose in a style related to

the circumstances of racial oppression that he faced as a young man, however, and

to tie it to the same African images that he was required to represent in a situation

where he had considerably less power and freedom than he would have by the end

of his career, suggests that jungle style as a representation of Africa meant more to

Ellington than a simple response to the conditions of the 1920s New York entertain-

ment industry. Just as Ellingtons musical Latin America continued to rely on the

same Latin tinge elements that he had encountered throughout his life in the United

States even after his South American travels, Ellingtons version of Africa was forever

informed by the way Africa was perceived, presented, and imagined in his home

culture, the idealized culture dened by the promise of 1920s Harlem. As a youngman living and working in the atmosphere of Harlem and the Cotton Club, Ellington

was willing to tie his bands African American blues-based style to the idea of African

jungles. As an older man who had witnessed a changing Harlem struggling with the

aftermath of race riots, an African American culture shifting toward more overt acti-

vism and nationalism, and the emergence of African nations free from the control of

European colonizers, he did not sever that tie. 1920s Harlem was not a place and

time that Ellington escaped fromit was a historical place and time that represented

endless possibility to him, the beginning of a great black culture that he was a part

of, a place that he could escape toin order to articulate his hopes.

Perhaps, then, Ellingtons late jungle pieces are evidence neither of his heroism in the

face of Jim Crow oppression, like his early works, nor modernist progress to new levels

of race-conscious free speech like the 1950s and 60s work of Charles Mingus, Max

Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and others of their generation. The fact that they do not t com-

fortably within entrenched jazz history narratives that offer a story of constantly

forward-looking African American triumph provides yet another motivation for

pushing Ellingtons already maligned late works, including those that recast the

Cotton Club in Africa, to the margins of collective jazz memory. Perhaps it seems

uncomfortable to contemporary jazz audiences and historians that the man celebrated

as one of jazzs earliest and greatest champions spent the height of the civil rights eraclinging to primitive imagery from the exploitative entertainment industry of 1920s

Harlem. Yet, allowing our desire for a heroic musician constantly overcoming the

past, constantly at the forefront of musical and social activism, to overshadow the

actual choices Ellington made as a composer and the complete body of music he left

us does not always serve him or jazz history justly. Ellingtons late career choice to

revive jungle style in an African context speaks to fond memories of 1920s Harlem,

not just anger at the oppression he faced there, but enjoyment of his early career

even in all the imperfection of its circumstances. Though Ellingtons late jungle

pieces do continue to echo primitive associations in their presentation of Africans,



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they also reect his persistent hope for both Harlem and Africa and his ability to assert

ownership of his musical past, regardless of the forces that shaped it.

Abstract

The unique sound of the subset of Duke Ellingtons 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 Harlems Cotton Club

in the late 1920s. Signicantly, while the expectations of early 20th-century white Amer-

ican 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 audi-

ences 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 shifthis public image from wild jungle entertainer to artistically signicant composer, and to

works likeLa Plus Belle Africaineand Togo Brava Suitethat were composed for speci-

cally 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.


Documents

Beyond the Cotton Club