January 23, 1943: the United States and its allies were at war with the Axis powers in Europe and Africa and across the Pacific, immersed in a conflict that encircled the globe. The renowned 43-year-old African-American bandleader Duke Ellington was making his debut that evening at New York City‘s Carnegie Hall, one of the most esteemed concert halls in the world. As Ellington often did in these years, he began with a performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner." The concert was also a fund-raiser for Russian war relief, as the Soviet Union remained under brutal siege from invading German armies. Among the full house at Carnegie were celebrities and artists such as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, conductor Leopold Stokowski, soprano Marian Anderson, and poet Langston Hughes.
For Ellington it was a dramatic opportunity to present a work that had been a long time forming, a panoramic musical history of the African-American experience that he called Black, Brown And Beige. It was a 45-minute long jazz symphony constructed in what Ellington called "the Negro idiom," and it proved to be an artistic success ahead of its time. Performed at a moment when many scholars believe the Ellington band and its composer to have been at a creative zenith, with the nation in the midst of war and black people still living under segregation, Black, Brown And Beige is a complex American masterpiece that sets out to broaden a people‘s and a country‘s sense of its history. In their essay "Race And Narrative In 'Black, Brown And Beige,'" Lisa Barg and Walter van de Leur write:
Through its successive themes, its restless progression of transitions and modulations, and its sudden changes in tempi and meter, Ellington sought to "parallel" the monumental movements, migrations, and ruptures in racial time and space that have characterized African-American historical consciousness. In blurring the boundaries between myth and history or memory and history, Ellington‘s narrative underscores the epistemological problems of "history" for peoples whose voices and experiences have been erased (or repressed) from official white histories.
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