How Duke Ellington evoked a place in time with his ‘Harlem’

Though Duke Ellington remains best known for the thousands of jazz-based works he composed over his five-decade career, he also expanded the boundaries of jazz with pieces inspired by classical music. Ellington wrote suites, symphonic jazz, ballet music, film scores and a jazz opera Queenie Pie, left unfinished at his death. Along with his constant collaborator Luther Henderson, Ellington invented symphonic jazz: a hybrid genre, born in the 1920s, that blends jazz’s rhythmic, improvisational style with the instrumentation and structure of a symphony orchestra. 

Commissioned by the NBC Symphony Orchestra and its legendary maestro Arturo Toscanini, Harlem (1950) was conceived as part of a larger project to depict the moods of New York City in music. Decades later musicologist Aaron Prado would write of Harlem: “It’s just a tour de force! I think of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, where each instrument is given a chance to shine. I mean, Harlem is just about as close as you get to that sort of thing.” 

Alternately titled A Tone Parallel to Harlem, the work was first performed in a jazz-band version at the Metropolitan Opera House in January 1951. It was orchestrated by Luther Henderson, often called “The Classical Arm” to Ellington"; he arranged Ellington’s symphonic works and brought a formal, classical structure to the Duke’s jazz compositions.

Harlem was performed by the Symphony of the Air under Don Gillis’ direction at Carnegie Hall on March 16, 1955.    

As Ellington used it, the phrase “tone parallel” is similar to the term “tone poem”: the musical experience parallels the subject that the composer is depicting. A Tone Parallel to Harlem thus is a musical reflection of a neighborhood. The work’s varied, well-defined sections depict encounters within New York City’s vibrant northern neighborhoods.

The first utterance comes from a solo trumpet, using a plunger mute, which evokes the word “Harlem.” In his memoir Music Is My Mistress, Ellington wrote of the piece, “It is Sunday morning. We are strolling from 110th Street up Seventh Avenue, heading north through the Spanish and West Indian neighborhood toward the 125th Street business area. ... You may hear a parade go by, or a funeral, or you may recognize the passage of those who are making civil rights demands. Harlem has its heroes, too: Jackie Robinson, Ray Robinson, Chief Justice Thurgood Marshall, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Bill Robinson.”

In April 1955, during the introduction to his band’s performance of Harlem at the Armory in Washington, D.C., Eillington told his audience, “[We] plan to picture some of the major ingredients of Harlem — a little sadness, a little gladness ... a lot of very handsome people who live in Harlem, endowed with great advantages. We’re bordered on the west by the Hudson River, on the east by the East River, on the south by the Rumba Belt, and on the north by the New York Giants. We find ourselves, along about halfway through this piece, in front of a church on Easter Sunday morning, witnessing an Easter parade, a little sadness, a little gladness, a dazzling satin doll, but moving on progressively.”