Mood Indigo Research Articles

Paradigms of Relationships in Faulkner, Woolf and Vian

The paradigms within human relationship are shaped by a multitude of factors which tug at the edges of the ability to form interpersonal bonds with the influence of experience. What constitutes experience, then, can be argued in several different manners. However, it is the interpretation of conventional, institutional education in the minds of the characters in Williams Faulkner’s Light in August, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Boris Vian’s Mood Indigo that sets a course for the trajectory of their relationships with others and with themselves. The various frameworks of the characters’ respective educations allow them to express what has been fed to them and how to interpret, knowledge. Once they are able to identify what constitutes experience through learning, these concepts, religious tenets, the awareness of factual circumstances, fixed categories imposed on reality, and ostensible truth as defined by ideology, are applied to models of human relationship, often with disastrous or emotionally numbing results through sticking to a pre-defined notion of how to apply what one is taught to one’s personal life. The characters of Light in August utilize an organic absorption of conventional education and religion as a form of teaching, as well as relying on past experience and intuition to traverse through their relationships, while the intellectual pursuits of the Ramsays and their acquaintances (particularly the male figures) in To the Lighthouse lead them to define relationship using ideas instead of raw emotion and experience. In comparison, the beautiful and tragic youth of Mood Indigo transform conventional education into goods for material consumption, as notions of the intellectual become synonymous with an indulgence in objectifying traditional forms of knowledge in monetary, and even human, form. The point at which education and desires converge and possibly become inseparable, then, marks the intersection not only between the compromise of relationships co-existing with powerful, learned ideas, but also the parallels between how self-acquired education through experience can differ from institutionalized thought. Can the distinctions between these methods lead to more or less successful relationships, or do they arrive at the same conclusion; the disintegration of previously cherished relationships? Is it then possible for education and relationship to co-exist peacefully? If not, perhaps it is this collision in the world of fiction that catalyzes the characters’ perpetual uncertainty with regard to both ideas.

Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible ! Courbet 68

Shot in 1967 and released in March 1968, by the young, engaged filmmaker Charles Belmont, Mood Indigo is a political interpretation of Boris Vian’s novel of 1947. The poetic world of Vian, mixing surrealism with jazz and symbolist literature, intersects in the film with references to 19th-century realist painting by Courbet and Millet. These appear as pictures on the walls, transformed into tableaux vivants, or as a personification of Courbet wandering in the landscape. Such paradoxical mobilization of realist painting, which professed to exclude the imagination, needs be considered as constituting a case of the reception of realism in the context of 1968. Over and beyond witnessing how “bourgeois” investments in the cultural heritage could be targeted on the part of militants of the extreme left, Mood Indigo contributes to the subversion of the traditional opposition between the real and the imaginary underlying the mythic graffiti “Be realistic, demand the impossible” that flourished on the walls of Paris that Spring.

A Study on the Color Mise-en-Scene in the film 〈We need to talk about Kevin〉 and 〈Mood Indigo〉

A Study on the Color Mise-en-Scene in the film 〈We need to talk about Kevin〉 and 〈Mood Indigo〉

Even Better than the Real Thing: Boris Vian, Vernon Sullivan, and Film Noir

The light-skinned Negro who passes permanently cuts himself off completely from the colored world.... Sometimes he prepares for the adventure by learning Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese. He thus becomes foreigner, and as everyone knows, foreigner is apt to be any shade color --Herbert Asbury, Who is Negro? (1946) In 947, year after its publication, Sullivan's novel J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (I Spit on Your Graves) topped the best-seller lists in Paris, selling in the region half-million copies. Set in the American South, with strong echoes William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Richard Wright's Native Son, J'irai cracher narrates the tale Lee Anderson, an African American who passes for in the small town Buckton. (1) As the novel unfolds, the narrator reveals that he has come to Buckton to avenge the lynching his brother. During the course the novel, Anderson rapes and then murders two wealthy sisters to exert what he claims is racial vengeance. The book's Boris Vian, wrote in his preface to the novel that I Spit could never have been published in America, claiming that it had been refused publication in the U. S. because the descriptions violence performed by black man on women. In the preface, Vian gives an account how Sullivan, an African American who passed for white, had fled the racial oppression the United States to settle in Paris. One must see, Vian writes, a manifestation desire for revenge in race still ... badly treated, and terrorized, sort temptation exorcism 'real whites' (viii). And yet it was in France that the controversy erupted: the novel was banned by the French government in 1949, becoming the first book since Madame Bovary to be tried for obscenity in France (Campbell, Exiled 17). The history the novel took further twist when, in apparent fulfilment the censors' fears, middle-aged businessman strangled his mistress, leaving copy Sullivan's novel by the side the bed. French journalists were quick to point out that the murderer had circled several passages Sullivan's novel, including graphic description strangulation (Campbell, Exiled 82). During the media furor, it transpired that the novel's translator, Boris Vian--a writer, dramatist, jazz musician and composer--was in fact the author I Spit. Vernon Sullivan was fictional nom de plume Vian had created. This was case, as James Sallis neatly puts it, of man (Vian) pretending to be black man (Sullivan) writing novel about black man (Lee Anderson) pretending to be white (Vian x). According to several accounts, Vian wrote I Spit after bet with his friend Jean d'Halluin, the director Editions du Scorpion who wanted to rival the success Gallimard's Serie Noire. A best seller? Vian asked. Give me ten days and I shall manufacture one for you (Cismaru 28). The result, produced little later than the ambitious ten days, was I Spit on Your Graves. The film version Vian's novel was shown in 1959. When the movie was first screened, Vian reluctantly went to the viewing, keen to make sure that his name had been expunged from the credits project from which he wanted to distance himself. Several minutes into the film, Vian cried out, These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!, whereupon the writer suffered heart attack and was shortly pronounced dead (Vian ix). Vian is probably best known outside France for his novel L'Ecume des jours (translated variously as Froth on the Daydream, Mood Indigo, and Foam the Daze) but he also wrote some well-known antiwar songs in the mid-1950s during the Algerian conflict. His best-known song, Le Deserteur, became big hit for Peter, Paul, and Mary in the mid-1960s as Vietnam protest song, and yet despite his transatlantic appeal in song, his literary work has not had the critical attention it merits; Gast's film version the book is barely noted in critical writing or reviews. …

Nina Simone's Triple Play

Nina Simone's Triple Play Daphne A. Brooks (bio) Listen to the opening notes of Nina Simone's remarkable 1957 debut album Little Girl Blue and one hears a performer asserting her intentions, throwing down the glove: the exuberant "motor running-running" (Dobie 232) trademark vocals, the playfully virtuosic dance of a pianist's velocity that turns the tempo of a Duke Ellington classic inside out and breaks open the melody to mine the ironically pulsating energy, the propulsive beat of non-stop "indigo" heartbreak. As jazz critic Scott Yanow states in the liner notes to the album, Simone's take on Ellington was one of many "unexpected" and "memorable" twists that introduced the artist to the world. "[R]ather than begin the [recording] with one of her more accessible vocals," says Yanow, "Simone starts out with a surprisingly up tempo and abstract piano exploration of 'Mood Indigo' before her vocal makes the song a bit more recognizable" (Yanow). It remains the first (public) record(ing) of Nina Simone's counterintuitive brilliance as an artist who defied the center, ran circles in the margins, and wove together "highbrow" and "lowbrow" forms to create an off-beat repertoire that was, some might argue, "emo" before "emo," Afropunk, folk eclectic, jazz torch song magic.1 No one critical apparatus can sustain a sufficient reading of Nina Simone, an artist celebrated in part for having stylized a heterogeneous musical repertory of songs for nearly four decades. A classically-trained pianist who shifted into jazz, pop, cabaret, and folk performing in the mid 1950s as a way to support her education and subsequently to shore up her income, Simone gained notoriety for having moved fluidly from playing the music hall chanteuse by covering Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" (inspired by Billie Holiday's interpretation) and the Norwegian folk lilt of "Black is the Color of My True Lover's Hair" to "Duke Ellington compositions, Israeli folk songs, and songs by the Bee Gees" (Bernstein B6). She was the ultimate queen of popular music "crossover" in the most exhilarating and unconventional sense of the word, and she deftly and consistently called upon this ability to mix and match musical forms as a way to break free of the racial and gender circumscriptions placed upon her in popular music culture. Simone frequently commented on the significance of her generic moves, boldly proclaiming that "'It's always been my aim to stay outside any category'. 'That's my freedom,'" she insisted to one reporter. But it was a "freedom" that, according to biographer David Nathan, "drove industry pundits and the music press crazy as they tried to categorize her" (Nathan 232). [End Page 176] "There Must Be Some Kind of a Way Out of This Place": Nina Simone's Musical Maroonage In many ways, Nina Simone would shape the bulk of her career in response to an aesthetic conundrum: what should a black female artist sound like? Some of Simone's most famous song titles summed up this query. Through her music she sought to make her listeners grasp how "it would feel to be free" and to be "young, gifted, and black," as well as female. Her songs thus served as sonic struggles in and of themselves, as embattled efforts to elude generic categorizations as a black female performer. These points would likewise resonate throughout much of Simone's intense and absorbing memoir, I Put a Spell On You, a text in which the artist assails the cultural myopia of critics too obtuse to read the aesthetic range and complexities of her material. "[S]aying what sort of music I played," Simone observes, "gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there" (Simone and Cleary 68-69). For Simone, the constant (and, in her mind, completely erroneous) comparisons to Billie Holiday were signs of the music press's inability to read the depth of diversity in black female musical expression. People, she argues, "couldn't get past the fact we were both black. . . . Calling me a jazz singer was a way of ignoring my musical background because I didn't fit into white ideas of what a black performer should be" (Simone...

Duke Ellington's America

Few American artists in any medium have enjoyed the international and lasting cultural impact of Ellington. From jazz standards such as Mood Indigo and Don't Get Around Much Anymore, to his longer, more orchestral suites, to his leadership of the stellar big band he toured and performed with for decades after most big bands folded, Ellington represented a singular, path-breaking force in music over the course of a half century. At the same time, as one of the most prominent black public figures in history, Ellington demonstrated leadership on questions of civil rights, equality, and America's role in the world. Drawing on extensive research and a wealth of new interviews, Duke Ellington's America paints a vivid portrait of the life and times of this towering figure, taking him from his youth in the black middle-class enclave of Washington, DC, to the heights of worldwide acclaim.

White Coat, Mood Indigo — Depression in Medical School

Medical students are more prone to depression than their nonmedical peers. Julie Rosenthal and Dr. Susan Okie write that depression not only affects students' lives but may also have repercussions for patient care in the long run.

Enduring Public Diplomacy

On April 11, 2003, over the caption: "Palace of Rubble: American soldiers yesterday inside a ruined palace in Baghdad that belongs to president Saddam Hussein's son Uday," the front page of the New York Times featured a picture of what had been a grand piano, reduced to rubble. Glancing at the demolished piano, two American soldiers ascended the palace's winding staircase, which had survived amid the surrounding wreckage.1 The photograph appeared during an international outcry after U.S. troops had neglected to safeguard museums and priceless archaeological artifacts from extensive looting and destruction. As the seeming triumph of Saddam's overthrow was followed by chaos, I recalled from my research a moment forty years prior when U.S. officials in Iraq described a strikingly different (if far from unproblematic) relationship with that country. In November of 1963, the Duke Ellington orchestra performed in Baghdad under the auspices of the State Department. What turned out to be a very eventful visit to Iraq began with the band's performance at a reception celebrating the founding of the United States Marine Corps held at the home of U.S. Ambassador Robert C. Strong. A U.S. embassy staffer later noted that the party for the 188-year-old Marine Corps took place in a 1,200-year-old city, further apprising the State Department that "the ambassadorial residence rocked," as four hundred Iraqis and Americans danced to "such old favorites as 'Take the "A" Train,' 'Mood Indigo,' 'Sophisticated Lady' . . . or crowded around the orchestra for a closer look at the ageless Duke."2 Local concert promoters had feared a lack of interest, but the first concert on November 12 not only sold out but was broadcast live in its entirety by Iraqi state television. According to the embassy, an enthusiastic first-night audience watched the concert at Khuld Hall near the presidential palace, while "all over the city thousands sat around television sets in open air cafés and restaurants or in the comfort of their own homes and enjoyed the artistry of one of the great contemporary figures in American music."3 While we cannot know the depth of the American official's appreciation of the ancient cultural heritage of Iraq, it is evident that he appreciated the richness of the tradition enough to revel in the comparison with the less [End Page 335] venerable U.S. Marines. Here, the juxtaposition of ancient Iraqi civilization with a military institution with extensive involvement in U.S. imperial policies was as striking as the official's portrayal of a vibrant modern Iraqi public culture, in which those unable to attend the concert partook of the experience through broadcast television in cafés, restaurants, and in one another's homes. The story of Duke Ellington in Iraq opens with a birthday party, but will continue with jazz concerts, nightclub appearances, a coup d'etat, and the U.S. sale of military helicopters to an allied Iraqi regime; and points us forty years ahead to all-too-familiar scenes of bombings, civilian casualties, looted museums, the torture of Iraqi detainees, and smashed pianos. I begin with this story not to suggest that the United States once had a better, or even a more complex and nuanced, relationship with Iraq, but because I think the story of Ellington in Iraq highlights the valuable challenges raised by Liam Kennedy and Scott Lucas for practitioners of American studies, and especially those concerned with transnational American studies: what are the implications of the troubled history and present of American public diplomacy and the "state-private network for political warfare" for our endeavors to forge a critical American studies? Given the entanglement of public diplomacy in U.S. hegemonic projects of the past fifty years, and taking as a point of departure Kennedy and Lucas's compelling discussion of the distinctiveness of the contemporary regeneration of public diplomacy, we might begin with the obvious absurdities in the term "public diplomacy." The term, Kennedy and Lucas explain, was defined...

The Genesis of "Black, Brown and Beige"

Ellington's descriptions of the creative process often emphasized speed and efficiency. Like a reporter trained to work under deadline, he knew how to compose under pressure--usually for his orchestra's next recording date or concert appearance--and took pride in this ability. Ellington filled his memoirs, Music Is My Mistress, with anecdotes showing him swiftly, even effortlessly, turning out new pieces, often at the last minute. He claimed to have dashed off the extended work Creole Rhapsody (1931) overnight, writing much music ... that we had to cut it up and do two versions (Ellington 1976, 82). Similarly, his labors on the 1925 musical revue Chocolate Kiddies reportedly lasted a single night: sat down that evening and wrote a show. How was I to know that composers had to go up in the mountains, or to the seashore, to commune with the muses for six months in order to write a show? (71). Shorter compositions, like the popular Mood Indigo (1930) and Solitude (1934), apparently required less than thirty minutes to complete (78-79, 87). While these accounts may contain elements of exaggeration, (1) Ellington's generally swift rate of composition has been confirmed by other witnesses. His son Mercer was impressed when Duke wrote three numbers for Jump for Joy (1941) on a train between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles (Dance 1981, 40). And Jimmy Jones, the pianist and arranger who occasionally worked with the Ellington orchestra in the sixties and early seventies, once observed, amazing thing about Ellington is that he can think so on the spot and create so quickly. I watched Duke write once and it was astonishing. When he knows what he wants and has got it in his mind, he can write awfully fast (217). In recounting how he to write Black, Brown and Beige, the massive, three-movement Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America, Ellington once again stressed the seemingly casual and spontaneous nature of his work habits. According to Music Is My Mistress, an impromptu suggestion by Ellington's manager caused him to undertake one of the largest and most ambitious pieces of his career: One day William Morris, Jr., said, 'I want you to write a long work, and let's do it in Carnegie Hall.' So out Black, Brown and (Ellington 1976, 180-181). The actual writing, Ellington recalled, began in December 1942--the month before the piece premiered in Carnegie Hall on January 23, 1943. Ellington started composing during a theater appearance by his orchestra in Hartford, Connecticut, on a bill that included the singer Frank Sinatra and a film titled The Cat Woman. While the film was being shown, Ellington would go to the piano onstage behind the screen and compose: It sometimes got pretty scary back there in the dark (Ellington [1973] 1976, 181). Ellington revealed little else about the process of writing Black, Brown and Beige, only noting blandly that the piece came off well and its premiere was an overwhelming success (Ellington [1973] 1976, 181). In this official version of the circumstances surrounding Black, Brown and Beige, Ellington reduced the work's long and tangled early history to a simple, easily digestible account. While Ellington may have composed Black, Brown and Beige quickly--and evidence suggests he did just that--he had been conceiving a large-scale work based on themes from African-American history for more than a decade. Contrary to the story given in his memoirs, neither William Morris Jr. nor an impending Carnegie Hall debut played a role in the origins of Black, Brown and Beige. They simply provided a deadline--the one crucial part of the creative process that Ellington himself, over a period of years, had been unable to secure. During these years, however, Ellington had worked on other projects that paved the way for Black, Brown and Beige: the Paramount film short Symphony in Black (shot in 1934, released in 1935), the socially conscious, race-proud musical Jump for Joy (1941), and, most important, the opera Boola, a work often cited in the Ellington literature but long shrouded in mystery. …

Mainstreaming Monk: The Ellington Album

He is, think, major jazz composer, the first since Duke Ellington. --Martin Williams (1963, 33) Monk took much of his style from Ellington and he would like to have been an accomplished pianist who could have articulated in the fashion of Ellington. --Clark Terry (quoted in Voce 1985) Ellington defined 101 arranging concepts and focused on sound. sound was the important thing. Thelonious did the same thing. --Larry Ridley (quoted in Gourse 1997, 259) continue to feel that to properly appreciate work and his position in jazz history it is essential to understand that he stands in direct line of succession from Morton and Ellington. --Orrin Keepnews (1986a, [2]) Duke Ellington's name surfaces often in discussions of Thelonious Monk. links between the two musicians seem so close as to be selfevident and irrefutable. Both excelled as composers in musical tradition known for its emphasis on improvisation. Both were distinctive pianists who displayed stylistic affinities--a percussive attack, penchant for dissonance, shared interest in Harlem stride. Both belonged to select group of exceptional figures in jazz--Jelly Roll Morton, John Lewis, and Charles Mingus also come to mind--who put their individual stamp on the ensembles that performed their works. Both created unique worlds of sound that set them apart from their contemporaries. Although their personalities and careers may have been poles apart, Monk and Ellington, so the literature on jazz reminds us repeatedly, were kindred spirits. Ellington thought so, too, apparently. He first heard music, according to trumpeter Ray Nance, in the summer of 1948. Nance was traveling with Ellington and small group of musicians on short tour of England and had taken with him a portable gramophone. As Nance told Stanley Dance in 1966 interview: I was on my way to Bournemouth, Hampshire, by train, and in my compartment put on one of my Thelonious Monk records. Duke was passing by in the corridor, and he stopped and asked, `Who's that playing?' told him. `Sounds like he's stealing some of my stuff,' he said. So he sat down and listened to my records, and he was very interested. He understood what Monk was doing (Dance 1981, 139).(1) In later years, Ellington and his orchestra occasionally appeared at festivals that featured Monk on the same bill. On one occasion, the 1962 Newport Jazz Festival, Monk sat in with the Ellington orchestra to play his own Monk's Dream and the Billy Strayhom homage Frere Monk, the latter twelve-bar blues with vaguely Monkian head and dissonant riff figures, including flatted-fifth chords in the last chorus. Both pieces were recorded by Ellington (without Monk) in September 1962 but not issued until the 1980s. They serve to reinforce the notion of musical kinship between Monk and Ellington--a relationship that Monk himself had invited listeners to consider seven years earlier. was July 1955 when Monk--a thirty-seven-year-old pianist and composer still not widely known to the public--made his debut recording for the Riverside label, released under the title Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington (Riverside RLP 12-201). Backed by bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Kenny Clarke, the enigmatic, reclusive Monk interpreted eight compositions by the popular, internationally acclaimed Ellington. Nearly all were standards frequently performed by singers and instrumentalists: Sophisticated Lady, I Got Bad (and That Ain't Good), Solitude, Mood Indigo, It Don't Mean Thing If Ain't Got That Swing, I Let Song Go Out of My Heart, and the Ellington-Juan Tizol collaboration Caravan. exception was Black and Tan Fantasy, piece dating from 1927 that was closely identified with the Ellington orchestra and seldom played by others. Three years later, in 1958, the album was repackaged and reissued by Riverside with painting by Henri Rousseau, The Repast of the Lion, reproduced on the cover (see Fig. …

The unruly text and the rule of literature.

Arnold Weinstein advances the notion that all texts, like all bodies, are unruly, if the reader is expert enough to recognize the organic chaos. Presenting three works that explicitly deal with sick bodies---selections from Winesburg, Ohio, "The Country Doctor," and Mood Indigo---Weinstein methodically unearths elements of plot and form that undermine a superficial order, thereby revealing great chasms in the chain of signification of the works.

Editors' Introduction -- The Unruly Mise-en-Corps: Body, Text, and Healing

The Unruly Mise-en-Corps: Body, Text, and Healing Rita Charon (bio) and Nancy Dew Taylor (bio) To call for papers on “unruly texts” implies, by some default, that texts ordinarily discussed in the pages of this journal tend toward the ruly. By and large, the field of literature and medicine has, until recently at least, limited itself to realist fictions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that center, to some extent, on illness, health professionals, or patients. The so-called canon of literature and medicine, most would agree, includes such works as “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Middlemarch, The Magic Mountain, and William Carlos Williams’s short stories about doctors and patients. Of late, however, teachers and students in the field have demonstrated poetic courage in seeking out unconventional texts, noncanonical texts, or texts that demand great literary skill from their readers. Mirroring, in part, the contemporary literary culture’s attraction to diverse and newly heard voices, scholars of literature and medicine have engaged themselves in the study of forgotten, impenetrable, or otherwise overlooked texts of all periods that might contribute to the enterprise of clarifying the storied dimensions of sickness and healing. As a result, we have heard at our meetings or read in our journals papers on such authors—deemed unruly for any number of reasons—as Dante, Alice James, D. M. Thomas, and Derek Walcott. We have permitted ourselves the latitude to teach and write about texts that have nothing to do with medicine or sickness but whose study may, generically or creatively or conceptually, bear some relation to the enterprise of healing. Heralding a new stage in literature-and-medicine studies, this attention to difficult or off-plot works seems to suggest a deepening of scholarly rigor. Layer by layer, we are examining—with a botanist’s attentiveness to structure, function, and beauty—the intricacies of the relation between medicine and literature, not only in the “plots” of works or medical backgrounds of authors, but in the deep parallels between literary acts and healing acts. If Jacques Lacan asserts that “the [End Page vii] unconscious is structured like a language,” we might want to assert that disease is a language, health another, and healing a translational enterprise allowing them to speak to one another. 1 The result of our call for papers about unruly texts supports such assertions. Not only did we receive papers treating complex texts with contemporary theoretical approaches, we also received papers that dealt with no recognizable text at all. It is as if the field, accelerating, moved straight from the canon to a land beyond literary boundaries and beyond generic rules altogether. The essays in this special issue complicate the already generative and untameable connections between body and text. In the first set of essays, collected under the subtitle Unruly Texts: Text as Body, two authors examine novels and stories that make explicit in one way or another the fundamental, wordless ability of the sick body to stand for culture and spirit or to become transparent to the gaze that would understand the self. In an essay of such clarity and reach that an introduction to this issue is superfluous, Arnold Weinstein advances the notion that all texts, like all bodies, are unruly, if the reader is expert enough to recognize the organic chaos. Presenting three works that explicitly deal with sick bodies—selections from Winesburg, Ohio, “The Country Doctor,” and Mood Indigo—Weinstein methodically unearths elements of plot and form that undermine a superficial order, thereby revealing great chasms in the chain of signification of the works. The fictions adopt sickness as mode, embodying such living processes as dreaming and bleeding and digesting in their drive toward meaning or in their representation of end-stage failure. The lack of order also characterizes the society delineated by Leslie Marmon Silko in Almanac of the Dead: A Novel. If Weinstein finds all texts, like all bodies, unruly, Ann Folwell Stanford shows how Silko uses bodies and body parts as symbols of an unruly society, one in which medicine is not only corrupted by but also infects the culture. Drawing on Mayan beliefs and prophecies as well as on contemporary social realities, Silko...

MOOD INDIGO

The SciencesVolume 33, Issue 2 p. 26-32 MOOD INDIGO Sidney Perkowitz, Sidney Perkowitz Sidney Perkowitz is Charles Howard Candler professor of physics at Emory University in Atlanta. He is at work on a book about light, from its cosmic origins to its role in the next generation of technology.Search for more papers by this author Sidney Perkowitz, Sidney Perkowitz Sidney Perkowitz is Charles Howard Candler professor of physics at Emory University in Atlanta. He is at work on a book about light, from its cosmic origins to its role in the next generation of technology.Search for more papers by this author First published: March‐April 1993 https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2326-1951.1993.tb03082.x AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume33, Issue2March‐April 1993Pages 26-32 RelatedInformation

"Black, Brown and Beige" in Duke Ellington's Repertoire, 1943-1973

After the confused and disappointing reception of Black, Brown and Beige by the critics at its premiere on January 23, 1943, Duke Ellington and his orchestra performed that work and most of the other pieces on the Carnegie Hall program just five days later at Boston's Symphony Hall. Many in the audience at these concerts knew Ellington as a successful danceband leader and writer of such popular songs as Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, and Don't Get Around Much Anymore. For those concertgoers not aware of his more explorative compositions, Black, Brown and Beige must have been a challenging or puzzling interlude in a program that lasted over three hours. As for the critics, Scott DeVeaux (in this issue) has noted that most were ill-equipped to assess the complete Black, Brown and Beige after only one hearing.1 These two concerts, a February WNYC radio broadcast of the entire Carnegie Hall concert, and the Rye High School preview may have been the only complete public performances of Black, Brown and Beige heard until almost thirty years later, when it was recorded by an orchestra of 1. Fortunately, Ellington's historic 1943 concert was recorded by technicians at Carnegie Hall and copies of the original acetate discs circulated among a small circle of record collectors. In the 1960s one of these collectors issued only the 45-minute Black, Brown and Beige portion of the concert as a bootleg LP on the Italian label For Discriminating Collectors. Other bootlegs surfaced later on the Hall of Fame and Ariston labels. These LPs were never advertised to the general public as they were pressed in small quantities and aimed primarily at specialists and collectors. The only commercial issue of Black, Brown and Beige from the 1943 Carnegie Hall concert was released in 1977 on Prestige, subsequently reissued on compact disc.

My Life with "Black, Brown and Beige"

For my teenage dance combo The Starlighters, I wrote arrangements of Mood Indigo and Caravan, trying to imitate the voicings I heard on the 78 rpm recordings I had been collecting. It was the mid-1940s and I was a fan of Duke Ellington's music, along with that of other big bands of my youth. I do not recall hearing Black, Brown and Beige. Who besides Ellington connoisseurs did in those days? But somewhere in my unconscious the provocative title was stored away, together with a sense that this was an important, serious work. Years passed. I developed from a trumpeter and arranger into a professional conductor. Then one fated day I met the man himself.

Who Needs Music Patrols?

Abstract Dear Editors: I was deeply shocked by your article in the July 1st issue entitled "A Music Patrol." We all know that music has never mixed with politics: musicians are neutral on such matters. Every country has all types of orchestras-symphonic, chamber and jazz—which perform all manner of music. This is especially so in restaurants, where a person goes to have supper, relax and listen to tunes of his choosing. Let us assume the band is playing American songs (in response to the listeners' demands) such as Lullabye, St. Louis Blues and so on. What now? Will Komsomol members interfere here too? Let them rather look to order in the streets and not try to butt in and offer their absurd advice in matters musical! Is it your idea that they are to forbid Eddie Rozner from performing Duke Ellington's Caravan and Mood Indigo?