At first glance, it might seem like just another museum exhibition dealing with dusty historical relics.
But to those who have created “Beyond Category: The Musical Genius of Duke Ellington,” and to those who have seen it, the show that opened Tuesday at the Du Sable Museum of African-American History carries an urgent message for America in the ’90s.
Granted, Ellington–who composed such timeless songs as “Sophisticated Lady” and “Satin Doll”–was born in a somewhat different America, during the waning days of the last century. Yet the triumphs and setbacks of his journey surely speak volumes about life, culture and race in the waning days of this one.
“This is a man who had to go wait for a train in the `Colored People’s Waiting Room,’ ” says Du Sable’s chief curator, Ramon Price, pointing to the re-creation of just such a place in the Ellington exhibit. “Yet the man who was sent to the Colored People’s Waiting Room at the same time was the toast of Paris!
“There’s a lesson in that, and I can’t wait until the buses start pulling up here and the schoolkids start pouring in,” adds Price. “When these kids see that Colored People’s Waiting Room, and when they hear the music this man created, they are going to learn something about making impossible dreams possible.”
Indeed, Ellington’s life epitomizes so many themes in the American dream, and so many enduring conflicts in the American experience, it’s a wonder an exhibition of this scope and stature hasn’t come along sooner. Created in 1993 by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the nationally touring show brings back to the spotlight “a man whose life is a kind of Prince Charming story,” says Deborah Macanic, the exhibition’s project director at the Smithsonian.
Certainly Ellington’s meteoric rise from obscurity to celebrity and his triumphs over the pervasive racism of his day have a certain storybook charm.
What’s more, the battles that Ellington (born Edward Kennedy Ellington in Washington, D.C.) fought rage on more than two decades after his death in 1974, at age 75.
“It has to be inspirational for kids, and for adults, to see what this man accomplished,” says Chicago author Dempsey Travis, who has seen the exhibit twice during recent previews. An acquaintance of Ellington’s from the mid-’30s until his death, Travis believes the exhibition contains priceless lessons.
“The show says, `I, too, can do it,’ ” says Travis. “So I think kids are going to come through this exhibition thinking, `If he could break through in those times, maybe I can break through in these times.’ “
Low-key lessons
To its credit, the exhibition, which fills several rooms of the Du Sable Museum, delivers its social messages subtly. Apart from the Colored People’s Waiting Room, the show’s references to racial discrimination are secondary to the glory of Ellington’s achievements in music, in black culture and in American life.
As visitors step into one corner of the exhibition, for instance, a radio broadcast suddenly commences (having been tripped by a light sensor). Instantly, the room comes alive with the sounds of Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, as broadcast live from the Cotton Club in New York, in the late 1920s. The uptempo music, which Ellington leads with brilliant chords on piano, suggests a young man of tremendous self-confidence about to conquer the world.
“It’s important that visitors hear what Ellington accomplished on radio,” says Price, “because we have grown people today who don’t realize that the TV wasn’t always there.
“They don’t understand that when folks sat around listening to the radio set in Duke’s day, everyone had to be on the same page. You couldn’t talk through it, the way you talk through TV today.
“And it was through radio that Duke’s music reached the masses.”
With the exception of Cab Calloway, no other bandleader of the era similarly captured the imagination of the listening public across America and around the world. Nor had an American composer yet penned such a striking range of compositions, from dance tunes (“It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing”) to romantic ballads (“Prelude to a Kiss” and “In a Sentimental Mood”), from big-band showpieces (“C-Jam Blues” and “Caravan”) to orchestral tone poems (“Daybreak Express” and “Azure”).
All of these works, and many more, can be heard at the touch of a button at the listening consoles placed throughout the exhibition.
It’s worth noting, however, that a few pieces in the original Smithsonian staging of the Ellington show are not on view at the Du Sable Museum, which was not large enough to accommodate them. These deal mostly with Ellington’s theater works, says Smithsonian project director Macanic.
Nor does the exhibition have quite the breadth or physical presence of “Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy,” a sprawling show presented earlier this year at the Terra Museum of American Art.
The strength of the Ellington exhibition, then, is in its message.
Still, the show has at least one, unmistakable tour de force. It becomes apparent as you enter the largest room in the exhibition, where lifesize sculptures of various Ellington band members stand as if waiting for a down beat from their leader. “Tricky” Sam Nanton with his gleaming trombone and plunger mutes, Barney Bigard with his clarinet pointed heavenward, Sonny Greer surrounded by the magnificent drum set with which he made Ellington’s band swing–they’re all there, as if frozen in some glorious moment in time.
“Just look at these guys, look at how magnificently they’re dressed, how organized they are,” says Price. “That tells kids that you’ve got to be organized, you’ve got to be disciplined to be able to accomplish something in life.
“And it tells them that great music, like Ellington’s, is written and orchestrated and read. It is not accomplished without hard work.”
Duke’s kind of town
No doubt Ellington paid a price for his success, a fact only fleetingly addressed in the exhibition’s sunny view of the composer’s life.
After his first heyday in the ’30s and ’40s, Ellington found himself presiding over a brilliant ensemble that had trouble supporting itself on the road. Changing fashions in popular music and rising costs of maintaining a big band meant that Ellington would have to support his dream band out of his own pocket, from the royalties that his immensely popular songbook generated.
His theater ventures, too, were financially dubious affairs, despite the ebullient scores to such groundbreaking, socially conscious shows as “Jump for Joy” (1941 in Los Angeles) and “My People” (1963 in Chicago).
If this darker side to Ellington’s life is largely overshadowed in “Beyond Category,” and if the show focuses on Ellington’s East Coast work, both of these shortcomings are counterbalanced by a remarkable and related show one flight down at the Du Sable.
“Douglas/Grand Boulevard: The Past and the Promise,” which the Chicago Historical Society presented in larger form earlier this year, gives the Ellington exhibition a unique historical context. As its title suggests, the show focuses on the rise and fall of one of the greatest of all black cultural meccas in America, popularly known as “Bronzeville,” on the South Side of Chicago.
Ellington himself rhapsodized on Bronzeville in his memoirs, “Music Is My Mistress” (Doubleday, 1973):
“Chicago always sounded like the most glamorous place in the world to me when I heard the guys in Frank Holliday’s poolrooms (in Washington, D.C.) talking about their travels,” he wrote.
“The way dining-car waiters and Pullman porters spoke of the city as `Chi-kor-ga’ fascinated me, and they told very romantic tales about the nightlife on the South Side. By the time I got there in 1930, it glittered even more. . . .
“The most impressive aspect, I think, was that the South Side was together. It was a real us-for-we, we-for-us community. It was a community with 12 Negro millionaires, no hungry Negroes, no complaining Negroes, no crying Negroes, and no Uncle Tom Negroes.
“It was a community of men and women who were respected, people of great dignity–doctors, lawyers, policy operators, bootblacks, barbers, beauticians, bartenders, saloonkeepers, night clerks, cab owners and cab drivers, stockyard workers, owners of after-hours joints, bootleggers–everything and everybody, but no junkies,” continued Ellington.
“Chicago then was all that they had said (it was) in the pool room: the Loop, the cabarets, the biggest railroad center in the world, beaches that ran along Lake Michigan the full length of greater Chicago, city life, suburban life, luxurious neighborhoods–and the apparently broken-down neighborhoods where there were more good times than any place in the city.”
There’s plenty of evidence of those good times in the Du Sable’s Bronzeville show, with slightly yellowed photo portraits of a young Louis Armstrong, the Original Creole Orchestra, blues belter Big Bill Broonzy and blues songwriter Willie Dixon, among others.
“Duke Ellington and everyone else in music played Bronzeville,” says Du Sable president Carl Perrin, and it’s no wonder. In 1930, Chicago’s Bronzeville had the second largest African-American population in America, after Harlem; by 1950, 190,000 people flourished in this black metropolis within a metropolis.
But a generation later, in 1980, the bottom had fallen out of Bronzeville, its economic base eroded by the decline in manufacturing and attendant poverty, crime and other forms of urban blight.
The flourishing South Side that Ellington had revered a generation earlier virtually had crumbled away, its remains documented through photos and videotape in the Bronzeville show.
It’s a dark and haunting counterpoint to the Ellington exhibit upstairs, yet it makes Ellington’s achievements in music and in American culture seem all the more striking: Even as the inner cities of America were falling apart, beginning in the ’60s, Ellington was celebrating the glories of black culture in song, in stage musicals and in his sacred music.
“To tell you the truth, I think every schoolkid, black and white, should be required to see this Ellington exhibit,” says Furmin D. Sessoms, acting executive director of the Chicago Southside NAACP.
“Seeing a show like this can only give a kid hope.”
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“Beyond Category: The Musical Genius of Duke Ellington” runs through March 31 at the Du Sable Museum of African-American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. Phone 312-947-0600.
