Duke Ellington Performs "Take The 'A' Train"

Above, something to set the mood for Claudia Roth Pierpont's excellent article — Duke Ellington’s music and race in America. An excerpt:

Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in 1899, in Washington, D.C., at a time when the nation’s capital was arguably the best place for an African-American child to live. The largest urban Negro community in the country maintained its own opera company, classical-music groups, and literary societies; its segregated schools taught African history, stressed proper manners and speech, and were intent on producing students who were, in Ellington’s phrase, “representative of a great and proud race.” For many years, from Emancipation through the imposition of onerous racial restrictions by the Wilson Administration, climaxing in a brutal, white-sparked riot following the First World War, the upper stratum of the city’s black population held to a proto-Harlem Renaissance ideal: demonstrate how civilized, intelligent, and accomplished we are, and racism will fade away. One need not demand respect if one commands it.

My freshman English textbook used to include a reading by the great Nat Hentoff on Duke Ellington, but it was removed from the latest edition. (It was in the "diversity" chapter, and seems to have been axed because American Blacks are no longer "diverse" enough.) Here are two Hentoffian analyses of Ellingtonian greatness — Duke Ellington’s Mission and Duke Ellington’s Posthumous Revenge.