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Jazz Perspectives
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Beyond the Cotton Club: The Persistence of Duke Ellington's Jungle Style
Kimberley Hannon Teal Published online: 08 Jan 2013.

To cite this article: Kimberley Hannon Teal (2012) Beyond the Cotton Club: The Persistence of Duke Ellington's Jungle Style, Jazz Perspectives, 6:1-2, 123-149, DOI: 10.1080/17494060.2012.721292 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2012.721292

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

Beyond the Cotton Club: The Persistence of Duke Ellingtons Jungle Style
Kimberley Hannon Teal

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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 Lenox Avenue 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 delicacies for white spectators, revues with titles like Hot Chocolates, and Its the Blackberries. The young Duke Ellington, who has recently composed his own rst show entitled 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 Jungle from 1931 offers a taste of what the Cotton Club sounded like.2 The tunes opening wa-was from 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 sliding gure 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
1 2

Jim Haskins, The Cotton Club (New York: Random House, 1977), 75. Duke Ellington, Early Ellington: The Complete Brunswick and Vocalion Recordings, GRD-3-640 GR, 1994, compact discs.

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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 accomplishment. Every eld of art is represented. The Palace of Art is crammed with paintings from eighty-six countries. The Hall of Justice is packed full of sculpture. Space equal to 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 represented and displayed. Every night in the concert hall the native theatre of a different country is presented without limitation of any kindAnd every night, on the balcony of the Engar Hotel, I sit and listen to the sea singing her songs of the historic past on the island from which the slaves were shipped. Farther in the distance, I can hear the tribes that have gathered on another island to rehearse for their show [the] next day. And then sometimes I wondered whether it was really a rehearsal, or was it a soul brothers ceremonial gathering with all of its mystical authenticity After writing African music for thirty-ve years, here I am at last in Africa! I can only hope and wish that our performance of La Plus Belle Africaine, which I have written in anticipation of the occasion, will mean something to the people gathered here.3

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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 since Echoes of the Jungle are 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 of pounding drums, shrill screams from the woodwinds, rough-edged brass playing, simple and repetitive melodies, call-and-response gestures, insistent background ostinati, 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 Jungle and La Plus Belle Africaine come with their own history of both real and imagined African imagery. Ellingtons 1941 comments on preparing an African scene for an intended opera lay out these two Africas, the literal and the ctionalized, that are the subjects of
Edward Kennedy Ellington, Music is my Mistress, (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1973), 337. Although 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 musics context. Regardless of Ellingtons 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 Ellingtons 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), 2846.
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numerous compositions from throughout his life. He said of his prospective scenelaid in 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 commercially motivated panderer. In his A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz, Weinstein 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 music even 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 weird rites and savage dances. To anybody with an understanding of African tribal society, to say nothing of black American 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 salvaging 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 primitivism. 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
Quoted by Alfred Frankenstein, Hot is something about a tree, says the Duke, San Francisco Chronicle (9 November 1941). 6 Norman C. Weinstein, A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (Metuchen, N.J. and London: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 12. 7 James Lincoln Collier, Duke Ellington (London: Michael Joseph, 1987), 93. 8 Richard 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.
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similar lines, Lisa Bargs work contextualizes the sounds of jungle style within the theatrical environment of the nightclub show in order to demonstrate that while Ellingtons 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 African American vernacular traditions, practices that revealed the ambiguities and contradictions of black modernism.9

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In Bargs analysis, the papier mach jungle of the Cotton Club that constituted a humorous, sexualized, and entertaining caricature for white observers could simultaneously be a jungle which wielded a great deal of rhetorical power, however contested, 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 Ellingtons 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 stereotypes was secondary to his main purposea more accurate, and positive, portrayal of black life 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 Clubs jungle skitsplus the various other exotic location sketches that were featuredreally did enable Ellington, as he claimed in Music 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 jungle mostly disappeared from the titles of Ellingtons works, a shift that seemed to indicate that the

Lisa 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. 10 Ibid., 134. 11 Lock, 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. 13 Ibid., 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 whitedominated 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 American peers or white spectators slumming in 1920s Harlem. Although many of the musical signiers Ellington employs to evoke the jungle in these works are closely tied 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 believe that in the heart of the Africa a man can travel into today there lies a great secret of music. Both want to go there and nd it. I should think it was possible that one day both of them will do it.15

The article, subtitled Harlems Duke Seeks 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 discussion of how he and Robeson were likely to explore Africa and its music, Mabie quotes him as saying,

14 Graham 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 Duke Seeks to Express His Race, in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 43.

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

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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 indigenous musics he learned about during these tours, his own compositional language tended not to incorporate specic foreign styles. In Penny von Eschens view, Ellingtons international suites bring to light the difculty of avoiding both the appropriation and over-simplication of the musical traditions of others when attempting to reference distant places in song.
Rather than engaging in a colonialist form of appropriation, Ellington was mining what he heard and saw [during foreign tours] as a way of coming to think differently about composition. In doing so, however, he sometimes resorted to clichs that reduced the complexity of other peoples music to a few musical signiers.20

Ibid, 43. Barry Ulanov, The Ellington Programme, in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Robert OMeally, ed. (New York, Columbia University Press, 1998), 169. 18 The 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. 19 Walter 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. 20 Penny M. von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 146.
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Latin American Suite provides 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 had recurring bossa-nova touches that would not have needed a trip to Brazil to acquire, but more frequently the Americanized tango Ellington had been using 40 years earlier.21

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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 musicians, and I really dont need to hear that, for I hear it every day. I want to hear Brazilian 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 changed little 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 70sthe implications of this aspect of Ellingtons compositional 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.

21 22

John Storm Roberts, Latin Jazz: The First of the Fusions, 1880s to Today, (New York: Schirmer Books, 1999), 140. Ellington, Music, 350. 23 Ibid, 351. 24 Ellington, 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. Ellingtons jungle style of intensely inected tones by wind playersscreeching woodwinds or vocal-sounding plunger muted brass, for instanceheavy, often low-pitched percussion, 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, Ellington 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 a hot rather than a sweet style. Ellington acknowledged Mileys importance in this development, saying Bubber used to growl all night long, playing gutbucket on his 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 Sam Nanton, 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 muteJoe Tricky Sam Nanton came in, and he and Bubber became a great team, working hand in glove. They made a ne art out of what became known as jungle style, establishing a tradition we still maintain today.28

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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
See, for instance, Mimi Clar, The Style of Duke Ellington, in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 303311. 26 Middleton, Musical Belongings, 72. 27 Quoted by Nat Shapiro and Nat Henthoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin to Ya (London: Peter Davies, 1955), 231. 28 Ellington, Music, 7172.
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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. 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 Ellingtons 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 Cminor 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 atmosphere. Retrospectively, the work can be associated with the jungle pieces Ellington wrote several years later. East St. Louis Toodle-Oos programmatic title, however, ties

See 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). 30 Middleton, 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 Americans 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 Ellington 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 performance. 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 featured 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 unabashedly 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 up jungle 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
Thomas L. Riis, Just Before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 18901915 (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989). 32 Ellington, Music, 80. 33 Chadwick Jenkins, A Question of Containment: Duke Ellington and Early Radio, American Music vol. 26, no. 4 (Winter 2008), 415441.
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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 that There is no evidence that Ellington either initiated or was particularly enthusiastic about the jungle label being attached to his music.34 Perhaps this is true of the Cotton Club era, but any controlling outside force that impels Ellington to introduce a movement of Togo Brava Suite in a 1971 performance by saying, And now, into the jungle! is much more difcult to see than the power structures that he had to navigate 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 recognized as a composer. A line of criticism initiated by R. D. Darrell in a 1932 magazine typically lled with classical music reviews started a lasting trend of comparing Ellington 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 Darrells writing, peppered with German words for an extra measure of classical-music authority, praises Ellington for such typically valued classical traits as compositional unity 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, creating personally and consciously out of the measureless store of racial urge for expression.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 presentation of himself and the reception of his works. The reception of Ellingtons Ko-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
Ibid., 82. Duke Ellington, Togo Brava Suite, United Artists Records UXS-92, 1974, LPs. 36 R. D. Darrell, Black Beauty, in in The Duke Ellington Reader, ed. Mark Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5765. 37 Ibid., 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, Florence Zunser reported,
At present he is at work on a tremendous task, the writing, in music, of The History of the Negro, taking the Negro from Egypt, going with him to savage Africa, and from there to the sorrow and slavery of Dixie, and nally home 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 subsequent 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 well consist of the music originally written for Boolas African introduction. While its specic programmatic meaning is not clear, Barry Ulanov states that the musical material of Ko-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-Ko makes 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 twelvebar blues in E-at minor, the only exceptions being a harmonically static introduction and coda (Ex. 2). The jungle topos is established at the outset by the use of low tom toms, a feature that returns in the coda to close the piece. Another primitivist musical 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 at the Paris Conservatoire, hailed Ko-Ko as a masterpiece of motivically developed absolute music that just happened to be in the jungle style, an emblem of sophistication
38 Florence 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. 39 See Mark Tucker, The Genesis of Black, Brown, and Beige, Black Music Research Journal, vol. 13, no. 2 (Autumn, 1993), 6786. 40 Ibid., 76. 41 Barry 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 Beige to a handwritten sketch of Boola. See The Genesis, 142.

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Example 2 Introduction to Ko-Ko. Duke Ellington, The Blanton-Webster Band Bluebird 5659-2-RB, 1986, compact disc. Transcription by David Berger. 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
42

Ellingtons 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.

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Example 3 Chorus 1 of Joe Nantons solo on Ko-Ko. Duke Ellington, The BlantonWebster Band Bluebird 5659-2-RB, 1986, compact disc. Transcription by David Berger. 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
43

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

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western classical musical values, such as Ellingtons clever reshaping of a conventional form, his economic use of motivic material, and his harmonic techniques. He concludes by saying,
In the perfection of its form and the quality of its ideas, the Concerto, which combines classicism and innovation, stands head and shoulders above other pieces played by big bands. It has almost all the good features found in the best jazz, and others besides that are not generally found in Negro music. It makes up for the elements it doesnt use by the admirable way in which it exploits those that constitute its real 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 the Concerto, he clearly holds it in the same high esteem, declaring its composition to mark the rst time that anyone had really written for a jazz orchestra and referring to it as the most perfect example of Duke Ellingtons language and one of 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-colonial Africa and makes it a symbol of Ellingtons kinship to western art music. This certainly 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 in Black, Brown, and Beige. The remaining three sections formed a progressive 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 in Black, Brown, and Beige, associations with the literal jungle are not, and the narrative content tied to the music presented a very different picture of African Americans than the context of the Cotton Club had. As Mark Tucker describes, Black, Brown, and Beige had a didactic, consciousness-raising function in 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 simplicity 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, including Black, Brown, and Beige. The jungle style elements that once made Ellingtons band a wild spectacle now furnished the touches that maintained the connection

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Ibid., 288. Andr 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.] 46 Mark Tucker, The Genesis of Black, Brown, and Beige, 74.
45

44

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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 a gradual shift in the ideological basis of symphonic jazz away from its Whitemanesque roots in (white) New York entertainment toward the hope of a serious concert work idiom based on the elevation of authentic, African American hot jazz.47

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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 classical composers. As Cohen puts it, After the Cotton Club engagement allowed the band to make strides into the broad white market, genius supplanted jungle as the key term.49 While jungle material remained very much a part of Ellingtons compositional style, Ellington and his management sought to reduce its primitivistic associations. 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 organization. It is true that this organization won its reputation at the Cotton Club in Harlem in New York, but do not refer to it as the Cotton Club orchestra, which is confusing. It is okay, however, to refer to the Cotton Club engagement in stories or advertisements, not forgetting that Ellington and his band also were featured in Florenz Ziegfelds musical comedy, Show Girl; in the motion picture Check and Double Check, with Amos and Andy, and with Maurice Chevalier in his rst broadway personal appearance. An excellent personal catch line of copy for Duke Ellington himself 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 if it was like a gem, explained Paul Mills, Irvings son who worked in the family business starting in the 1930s. Again! the stamp of Ellington genius! claims
John Howland, Ellington Uptown: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and the Birth of Concert Jazz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), p. 5. 48 Ibid., p. 39. 49 Harvey 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. 50 Advertising Manual: Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra (1931) quoted in Cohen, The Marketing of Duke Ellington, 299300.
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one 1935 ad, while another from the previous year proclaimed Ellington as a ve star genius.51

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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 announcing Ellingtons victory in a national contest in which he was crowned the King of Jazz, a writer for the Pittsburgh Courier declared 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 Mills management, members of Ellingtons ensemble presented themselves in a manner that was somewhat rare for African American jazz groups of the time. In addition to advertising that presented a rened picture of Ellington and his sidemen, they performed immaculately dressed, sporting tuxedos for 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-composer. As Cohen describes,
The Mills organizations marketing of Ellington differed from that of other songwriters, performers, or bands, African American or white, in its overarching insistence on portraying Ellington as an important American composer and as a genius, an artist whose work and demeanor should be associated with the values of quality and respectability. They intimated that Ellington uplifted, as well as entertained audiences. Such strategies shielded Ellington and the orchestra from being associated with the degrading contemporary images of Jim Crow segregation. Particularly from the early 1930s forward, the Ellington image served as a stark counterpoint to the buffoonish and decadent stereotypes that usually accompanied African American careers in popular music.54

Although Ellington had relied on calling his music jungle music to achieve popularity in the twenties, in the thirties, forties, and early fties, 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 Ellingtons work 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

Cohen, The Marketing of Duke Ellington, 301. Floyd 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. 54 Ibid., 296.
51 52

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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 attitudes toward civil rights, was changing. A new generation was emerging, and it took time for Ellington to adjust to and nally master these new realities.57

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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 signicantly 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 the 1950s 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 Faubus written in 1957, and even the normally apolitical Louis Armstrong 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,
Gunther Schuller, The Future of Form in Jazz, Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 20. 56 Harvey Cohen, Duke Ellingtons America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 4. 57 Ibid., 272. 58 Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 12.
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If in the mid-1940s playing with a mixed band was taken as a sign of a progressive racial attitude, by the mid-1950s a performer had to refuse to play to segregated audiences to meet the rising moral standards of the civil rights movement.59

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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, which was viewed by many as depriving African American musicians of a fair economic return on their creativity, many African American jazz musicians of the 1950s and 1960s seemed determined to emphasize and develop black difference rather than witness a repeat of the 1930s, when Benny Goodman was crowned the King of Swing.60

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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 of the concert hall shifted toward presenting jazz as a uniquely African American expressive 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 Ellington did participate in, however, was the move toward greater acknowledgement of a signicant relationship between jazz and Africa, a link that would be, according to Monson, 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 Festival of Negro Arts in 1966, the piece that he wrote to represent himself in his rst
Ibid., 61. Ibid., 106. 61 The writings of Amiri Baraka, Albert Murray, John Gennari, Eric Porter, and many others explore the signicance 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 Perspective ed. Ingrid Monson [New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2000], 2382) 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 consistent 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. 63 Ibid., 151.
60 59

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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 fullensemble melody is heard over a twelve-bar blues progression, and a strongly bluesinected 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 Africaine contains 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 neighbors. 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 progression, 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.

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

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Example 5 Opening melodic statement of La Plus Belle Africaine. Duke Ellington, Togo Brava Suite, United Artists Records UXS-92, 1974, LPs. Transcription by Bill Dobbins.

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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 of La 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 Belles closest relative in this respect may be Blue Pepper from 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 Beautiful Land on the Delta from the New Orleans Suite uses a strong Motown-like backbeat and Amad from the Far East Suite has a boogaloo feel. Yet, the parts of La Plus Belle Africaine that 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 other aspects 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 trombones.64 Afrique also shares with La Plus Belle a melody constructed from numerous repetitions of short, simple gures and minimal harmonization in the wind voicings. In Rhythm Pum Te Dum from A Drum is a Woman, Africa is evoked in the works Caribbean 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 Naturellement from Togo Brava Suite also makes use of Ellingtons classic jungle signiers in a work that he verbally tied to the jungle in performances, reinforcing 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 of La 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 nished, [the audience] shout[s] approval and dash[es] for backstage, where they hug and embrace us, some of them with tears in their eyes. It is acceptance at the highest level, and it gives us a once-in-a-lifetime feeling of having truly broken through to our brothers.67

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64 65

Duke Ellington, The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse, Fantasy 9498, 1975, LP. Duke Ellington, A Drum is a Woman, Columbia 951, 1956, LP. 66 Ellington, Music, 337. 67 Ibid., 337338.

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Ellington performed in Senegal as an inspirational example of an artist of African heritage 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 jazz during 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 ghting 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 Suite demonstrates the way in which Ellington recast material reminiscent 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 Ellingtons 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 for Ellington to nd an underlying narrativeto which the author also referred when
Lock, Blutopia, p. 84. Stefano Zenni, The Aesthetics of Duke Ellingtons Suites: The Case of Togo Brava Black Music Research Journal vol. 21, no. 1 (Spring 2001), p. 11. 70 Derek Jewell, Duke: A Portrait of Duke Ellington (London: Elm Tree Books, 1977), p. 153. 71 For 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 session were released (Storyville STCD8323, 2001).
69 68

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presenting the work in concert: the rst movement, relaxed and evocative, describes arriving on the silvery shores of Togo; the vigorous blues with a powerful nale, Naturellement, stands for moving into the jungle (the words that Ellington spoke 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 Cotton Club; Right on Togo is the joyful closing gospel, celebrating the return to civilization of modern-day Togo.72

Even without the verbal description of this piece, the choice of exotic signiers Ellington 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 clave pattern. 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 meandering chromatic lines one might encounter in an exotic opera like Bizets Carmen or Rimsky-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 Ellingtons other late worksTogo Brava was 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 to Ellingtons representation of African American musical narratives are notable. Ellingtons portrayal of Togo shares the same primitive to modern, rural to urban trajectory of his sketches for Boola and Black, Brown, and Beige. Mark Tucker traces the origins of Ellingtons basic storyline beginning in the jungle and moving from slavery to emancipation to Harlem to his exposure to both educational history programs put on by the African American community in Washington, D.C. and more entertainmentbased 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 nineteenth-century minstrel shows and made their way into more serious works like William Grant Stills Darker America and Afro-American Symphony before the eventual completion of Black, Brown, and Beige in 1943.73 As John Howland describes in detail in Ellington Uptown, triumphant or optimistic portrayals of Harlem remained mainstays 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 Harlem continued to focus on positive themes. Howland points out that,

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72 73

Zenni, The Aesthetics of Duke Ellingtons Suites, 20. Tucker, The Origins of Black, Brown, and Beige, 6972.

Jazz Perspectives
Harlems cross-racial entertainment business died altogether after the 1943 riot, and the neighborhoods fortunes continued to decline until its rock-bottom lows in the 1970s and 1980s. That Ellington composed Black, Brown, and Beige and New World 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

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In Right On Togo, Ellington essentially shifts his hopeful vision for Harlem as a progressive black metropolis with more churches than cabarets from an African American 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 Ellingtons other pieces was audience. 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 Ellingtons 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 that support 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 Africaine 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 1966 appeal to the entire Diaspora of black artists at the festival to embrace outdated primitive stereotypes as a part of their heritage by stepping behind the mask with him? The narrative of Togo Brava also begs consideration, as it could be seen as presenting young African nations as primitive and backward, awaiting progressive modernist development 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
Howland, Ellington Uptown, 13. Ellington 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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Beyond the Cotton Club

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 entertainment 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 young man 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 activism 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 to in 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 comfortably 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 era clinging 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 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 Ellingtons 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 signicant composer, and to works like La Plus Belle Africaine and Togo Brava Suite that were composed for specically 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.

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