It was the first Carnegie program dedicated entirely to the compositions of a black composer. It was also one of the first attempts to bring jazz tried into the world of serious “art music”—the realm of experimental music where new rhythms, sounds, and styles are attempted.

This was still a radical idea in 1943, when the musical world was a land with well defined borders. Jazz was still classified as “popular” music, principally intended for dancing not listening.

In 1924, George Gershwin had tried to merge jazz and classical traditions with his “Rhapsody in Blue.” The critics of important periodicals had tossed him a few crumbs of praise but had generally dismissed the work.

Almost twenty years later, they were no more generous to Ellington after his Carnegie concert, though Maurice Zolotow, who wrote “The Duke of Hot” for the Post that August noted that the Duke has plenty of prestigious admirers. Just before the concert began, Ellington was presented with a plaque honoring his contributions to music. It was signed by Leopold Stokowski, Artur Rodzinski, Fritz Reiner, Deems Taylor, and others — America’s foremost conductors and musicologists.

At this concert Ellington gave the world premiere of his “Black, Brown and Beige,” the longest swing tune ever written. It lasted forty-five minutes and stunned the Carnegie Hall audience. Ellington described it as a tone poem, a musical history of the Negro in America from slavery to the present time.

The music critic of the New York Herald Tribune remarked the next morning, “Duke Ellington is the only jazz musi­cian whose programs have enough musi­cal interest to be judged by the same standards one applies to art music.” The critic of the Harlem People’s Voice stated, “He is the articulate spokesman for the existence of a new Negro with a new point of view.” And the jitterbug viewpoint was less sedately expressed in Downbeat. The jive periodical head­lined: DUKE KILLS CARNEGIE CATS!

Generally, though, the critics were dismissive. Ellington filed the work away and never recorded it. But he never abandoned his goal of breaking new ground for jazz and enabling it to express the spirit of his times and his people.

America never doubted his mastery of the popular melody.

The man, who is considered by musicians themselves to be the supreme master of the music that swings, has composed some 950 tunes, including “Black and Tan Fantasy,” “Solitude,” “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” and his current hit, “Don’t Get Around Much Any More.”

But a growing number of music lovers, especially symphonic composers of the time, were fascinated by the innovation they heard within his works.

Some of Ellington’s most advanced jazz compositions—“Reminiscing in Tempo,” which takes up four sides on records, or “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” which takes up two sides—require two or three attentive listenings until they make sense, and a num ber of critics compare the later Ellington to Stravinsky and Ravel.

Stravinsky himself compares Ellington to Stravinsky, and when the ultramodern Russian com­poser visited New York several years ago and was asked by a reception committee what he wished to see in the metropolis, he replied that the first thing he wanted to do was to chase up to Harlem and hear Duke Ellington’s magnifique jazz symphonies at the Cotton Club. The reception committee had never heard of the Cotton Club.

European audiences, which were hearing Ellington’s music for the first time, responded as if these works were the next development in the classical tradition. When Ellington performed overseas, he found

The programs were annotated in scholarly style. The critics read ponderous implications into his tunes. After a concert in Utrecht, Holland, a Dutch critic wrote concerning a number called “The Mooche”: ‘I feel in this piece a conflict of two elemental forces: the one the violence of Nature, which is in an eternal struggle with the other, the force of Man, a more melan­choly, restrained and mental force.’

Ellington was pleased, and bemused, by these interpretations. The true inspiration of his increasingly complex music, he readily told anyone, came out of the history and experience of black Americans.

“People think,” Ellington likes to ex­plain, “that Negro music is different mainly because of the strong rhythm. But they don’t appreciate that the Negro, besides being full of the beat-beat-beat, also has terrific changes of mood and changes of pace, and he has greater ex­tremes of emotion and quicker changes of mood than other groups of people. And that is what our music expresses. And that is why I suppose it seems com­plicated to some people. Well, the Negro is a complicated person; that’s what some people don’t understand.”

It’s difficult now to get a sense of how Ellington and other jazz musicians—both black and white—re-defined American culture. The adventurous, explorative style of jazz—dismissed by Ellington’s 1943 critics as “formless and meaningless” and “too complex”—has become one of our greatest contributions to world culture. As described at this week’s White House jazz concert for Chinese president Hu Jintao, it is “quintessentially American.”

The Eventual Triumph of Duke Ellington The Saturday Evening Post

What made it such a memorable year was the diversity of music. Unlike later years, when one style of music seemed to dominate the charts, 1969 yielded a crop of highly diverse offerings. One the most original sounds arising in that year was “soul music.” Growing out of ancient roots, it was just starting to blossom. Eventually, it would develop numerous branches that would yield some of the best music in American.

This was how The Saturday Evening Post described this new musical genre [PDF download] :

A year ago, at the Monterey Pop Festival, The Who exploded smoke bombs and demolished their instruments onstage. Jimi Hendrix, having made a variety of obscene overtures to his guitar, set fire to it, smashed it, and threw the fragments at the audience. But “the most tumultuous reception of the Festival,” according to one journalist, went to Otis Redding and the Mar-Keys, all of them conservatively dressed and groomed, who succeeded with nothing more than excellent musicianship and a sincere feeling for the roots of the blues.

In examining Soul Music, the Post chose to focus on the pivotal role played by the Memphis music industry.

All over Memphis the boom is on: New recording studios are being built, and old studios are being expanded to meet the growing demand for the “Memphis Sound,” which everyone wants his recording to have. And in the traditional recording centers of New York, Los Angeles, and the old Tennessee rival, Nashville, the signs of Memphis’s musical renaissance are being read with some unease; for, down among the magnolias and the cotton bales, this strange and unprecedented combination of farmers, businessmen. dropouts, day laborers, shoeshine boys and guitar pickers is making Memphis a new center of the pop-music industry. The recording industries of New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville are all much bigger; Memphis is probably a distant fourth. But Memphis has lots of hits. Recently, on a just-average week, 15 of Billboard’s Top-100 pop records and 16 of the magazine’s Top 50 rhythm-and-blues recordings were Memphis products.

There are many explanations for Memphis’s musical success, but they all boil down to that one word: Soul. Bob Taylor, vice president of the American Federation of Musicians’ Memphis chapter, says, “We don’t have the world’s best musicians, or the greatest recording equipment. But one thing the music of Memphis does have is the ability to communicate to the listener a sincere, deep feeling. You can’t listen to a Memphis record without responding to what the musicians felt when they made it. You have lo, al the very least, tap your foot.”

At the Stax/Volt studio, which produces many Memphis hits, songwriters Isaac Hayes (at piano) and David Porter pursue a song they hope will be as big as their Soul Man and Hold On, I’m Coming.

Across the country, “soul” has become synonymous with “black”—as in “soul brother.” But in Memphis those who “have it” will tell you that soul is not the exclusive property of any one race. Nor, in spite of soul music’s origins in rural poverty, does it belong to any one economic class. It might have at one time, but it has become too prosperous for that. There are too many poor country boys with Rolls-Royces and matched sets of Cadillacs…

Memphis’s special affinity for soul comes from its very special history. The soul sound was born from work cries and field hollers in the lonely stretches of the Delta, and established permanent residence in Memphis after 1862, when the Federal army, having subdued the city, made its headquarters near Beale Street. The Negro population of the city consisted mainly of former slaves who felt they had good reason to fear the local whites, and therefore stayed as close to Federal headquarters as possible. After the war many Negroes came in from the country, trying to find their families. There were only about 4,000 Negroes in Memphis in 1860, but by 1870 there were 15,000. Beale Street, now a faded jumble of pawnshops, liquor stores and pool halls, was then the toughest street in the toughest town on the Mississippi River, and it attracted the Negroes, according to one historian, “like a lodestone”…

The first blues record was cut in 1920 at the Okeh Recording Company in New York. Mamie Smith’s version of Crazy Blues sold for months at the rate of 7,500 copies a week, and soon Memphis was overrun with record representatives. They did a brisk business with records by the Memphis Jug Band, the Beale Street Sheiks, Furry Lewis, and Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers…

The music business in Memphis did not revive until after the war. Another generation of blues men was on hand, most of them, as before, from the Delta. They played amplified instruments, and their newly added, heavy back beat caused the music of Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf to be called rhythm and blues. It was louder than the old blues, and it had more rocking rhythm, but its lyrical content was about the same—short phrases, pithy and sentimental, often with strong sexual imagery, viewing life and love from the bottom of society…

One of the most active early rhythm-and-blues companies was Sam Phillips’s Sun Records. Phillips had been a disc jockey for years on the Dust Bowl circuit, and became a record producer to cash in on the appeal R & B had for white teen-agers. But he did not intend to stop there: “I saw that if a person could get a combination of Negro spirituals, rhythm and blues, and hillbilly or country music—not just an imitation but with feeling and fervor and soul, like the Negro singers have, and the true country singers, too—well, I could really do something.”

Anyplace but Memphis, finding such a combination would have required a miracle. All Phillips had to do was wait. One day a truck driver from the Crown Electric Co. came in to Sun Records. “His hair was down almost to his shoulders. He had a real beat-up guitar” — and his name was Elvis Presley.

According to the author, Phillips and Presley became early contributors to Soul Sound by combining “the music of the country whites with rhythm and blues, ending segregated music.”

1969: The Post Listens To “The Soul Sound” The Saturday Evening Post