Jazz fest to present Duke Ellington rarity at the Fillmore

Courtesy photo

By Mark Stryker, Detroit Free Press Music

Another year, another rarely heard Ellington masterpiece.

The Detroit Jazz Festival is returning to the music of Duke Ellington to kick off its 2013 Community Series programming with a special presentation of “Black, Brown and Beige” at 3 p.m. March 10 at the Fillmore in Detroit. 

The concert, a celebration of African-American history, reprises the successful formula that the festival introduced last winter when it engaged New York composer, arranger and Ellington scholar David Berger to lead an all-star Detroit big band and guests through a large-scale Ellington work. Last year’s concert focused on Ellington’s oft-neglected sacred music.

This year, the centerpiece is “Black, Brown and Beige,” the ambitious 45-minute vernacular symphony that Ellington introduced at Carnegie Hall in 1943. The programmatic work, which Ellington subtitled “a tone parallel to the history of the Negro in America,” contains some of Ellington’s most deeply felt writing, but its structural flaws have kept it largely out of the repertoire — though part of the work, the spiritual-like “Come Sunday,” has become a standard. Complete performances of “Black, Brown and Beige” are scarce.

Read more: http://www.freep.com/article/20130130/ENT04/130130082