Celebrating the 50th Anniversary Of Duke Ellington’s UW-Madison Residency: Expressing the Soul of Black America
Duke Ellington
By Howard Landsman
“Fare thee well land of cotton
Cotton lisle is out of style
Honey chile, jump for joy
Don't you grieve, little Eve
All the hounds I do believe
Have been killed
Ain't ya thrilled? Jump for joy”
So go the lyrics to the title song from Duke Ellington’s pioneering 1941 stage production, “Jump for Joy.” The show, which opened in Los Angeles but never made it to Broadway, celebrated the triumphs and resiliency of African Americans, from their steadfast resistance to the evils of slavery to the growing emergence of a Black middle class during the first decades of the 20th century.
“Jump for Joy” was but one example of how the experiences of Blacks in America informed Duke’s body of work that includes over 3,000 compositions written over a 50-year period, from the mid-1920s until his death in 1974, by which time he had earned worldwide recognition as one of the 20th century’s greatest composers.
Said Duke in 1931, “My men and my race are the inspiration of my work. I try to catch the character and mood and feeling of my people. The music of my race is … the result of our transplantation to American soil and was our reaction … to the life we lived. What we could not say openly we expressed in music.”
Besides many famous popular tunes like “Satin Doll” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and stage shows like “Jump For Joy,” Ellington’s catalog includes a breathtaking array of ambitious extended works: original symphonic music and jazz arrangements of other classical works, an opera, film scores, a ballet for Alvin Ailey, three concerts of sacred music, and two dozen suites including Duke’s towering masterpiece, “Black, Brown and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America,” that premiered in 1943 at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
This body of work, and its creator, will be celebrated during the 2022 Madison Jazz Festival (6/10-6/19/22) when the UW’s Mead Witter School of Music commemorates the 50th anniversary of the “Duke Ellington Festival.” That event, a five-day residency that Ellington and his orchestra conducted on campus in July 1972, included major concerts each day along with workshops and masterclasses open to the whole Greater Madison community and beyond.
The impetus for Ellington’s residency was a conversation with the School of Music’s Percussion Professor, Jim Latimer, while Duke was on campus in 1971 to receive an honorary doctorate. Professor Latimer went on to organize and chair the festival, which turned out to be the most extensive and intensive campus residency of Duke’s storied career. Festival highlights included a complete performance of Duke’s Second Sacred Concert with the orchestra and an 81-member community choir drawn from 21 local churches, a “Family Day” concert at Camp Randall stadium that drew an audience of over 6,000, and the premiere performance of Duke’s “UWIS Suite,” composed especially for the occasion.
For this year’s anniversary celebration, UW-Madison Jazz Studies Director Johannes Wallmann is producing a major concert of Ellington music to be performed on Friday, 6/17/22, by current and former UW jazz faculty members, School of Music alumni, and local professional and student musicians. That same day, Professor Latimer will be joined by other former close associates of the Duke for an engaging panel discussion. Also, on Saturday afternoon, 6/11/22, the Sequoya Public Library branch will host a program that features recordings of rarely-heard gems of Ellingtonia along with a live performance Ellington music by iconic local jazz pianist Dave Stoler.
Stay tuned for more details on this year’s Madison Jazz Festival, including all of the Ellington events, in future issues of The Hues and on the Greater Madison Jazz online calendar at www.jazzinmadison.org.
