black, brown and beige

The extended jazz orchestral ensemble piece by celebrated musician, bandleader and composer Duke Ellington (*1899 – †1974) performed as his debut concert in Carnegie Hall on this day in 1943 was a tone poem framed as a parallel history of the Black experience in America. A concert album with Mahalia Jackson was released in 1958. Learn much more from Indiana Public Media and listen to interviews about the significance of the piece and performance and hear the second and third movements of this narrative symphony.