SHADOW PLAY: THE SPIRITUAL IN DUKE ELLINGTON'S "BLACK AND TAN FANTASY".

On the Seventh Day, God created the spiritual. The Garden of Eden: a lawn outside an antebellum Southern white church, where a group of slaves has secretly gathered to hear a Sunday morning church service.

   Huddled there, they passed the Word of God around in whispers....
   Noiselessly ... they'd inch a bit closer.... When the great white voice
   inside rang out in Triumph ... the blacks outside would grunt subdued
   approval. When the whites inside lifted voices in joyous song ... the
   blacks outside would hum along, adding their own touches ... weaving
   melodic, harmonic, rhythmic patterns. Thus the spiritual was born. Highly
   emotional worshipping of God in SONG.

This creation story--spanning seven days from a mythic Monday to Sunday and featuring an Adam and Eve named Boola and Voola--comes from Duke Ellington's scenario for Black Brown and Beige, his "tone parallel to the history of the Negro in America: (Ellington n.d.).(1) As a divinely created song, the spiritual watches over that history. In Black Brown and Beige, Ellington's spiritual melody--the lucent "Come Sunday"--offers solace, chimes faith, and extols triumphs.

This glorification of the spiritual and the "tone parallel" recounting of African-American history furthered the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that aimed to uplift blacks in American society by celebrating their artistic and historical achievements. During the Renaissance, the spiritual was lauded as one of the crowning achievements of the race. In his influential essay "Of the Sorrow Songs," W.E.B. Du Bois helped coronate the genre, presenting it as a noble voice of suffering, raised during slavery, that conveyed the sadness, hope, and faith expressed by its creators to following generations (1903, 250-264).(2) Du Bois's conception of the "sorrow songs" served as the Renaissance ideal of the genre and was musically realized in the performances of such singers as Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes and in the arrangements of J. Rosamond Johnson, among others. Notably, these versions largely eschewed folk practices, drawing instead on the vocal and compositional conventions of European concert idioms, an affiliation that enhanced the gravity and classicism that Du Bois ascribed to the genre (Radano 1995; Sundquist 1993, 525-539).

Although incorporating jazz styles, Ellington's evocation of the spiritual still paid homage to the sorrow song ideal with its suggestions of musical and historical transcendence. "Come Sunday," however, came late to the Renaissance veneration of the spiritual. Premiered in 1943, Black, Brown and Beige appeared almost a decade after that movement had died out, a lag resulting from the long gestation of the unprecedented work.(3) But Ellington had drawn upon spirituals before this, incorporating one into "Black and Tan Fantasy" during the late 1920s, the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance.(4) According to Bubber Miley, co-composer and a cornetist in Ellington's band, a spiritual inspired the main theme of the work (Dodge [1934] 1993, 108); however, as discussed below, that spiritual was not one of the treasured sorrow songs but rather a hybrid tune derived from a sacred song by a white composer.

Whatever its origins, Miley's spiritual is part of a mix of sacred and secular elements in "Black and Tan Fantasy," a variegated piece that blends the spiritual together with blues, contemporary urban jazz idioms, call-and-response patterns, and a Chopin quotation. This amalgam creates a variety of moods and sensations, including a broad satirizing of religious display. Behind the satire lies a less obvious irony, one that can be heard as targeting the sorrow songs. "Black and Tan Fantasy" presents an ironic reversal of those works and the musical and religious propriety that defined them. The jazz work does not treat its spiritual in such a pious manner; rather, it uses blues idioms to distort the melody. This transformation, as seen in contemporary reviews of the piece, fascinated listeners and, with the later appearance of the beguiling work in a film, moviegoers as well.

The distortions and elements of irony in "Black and Tan Fantasy" can be best appreciated by first discussing the form of the work (see Fig. 1).(5) Shadowed by Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton on trombone, Miley opens the piece with his spiritual theme, presented as a dark minor twelve-bar blues chorus (see Ex. 1). Ellington immediately contrasts this with a second theme, a sixteen-bar (two eight-bar units) nonblues melody set in the major mode. Polished by Otto Hardwick's alto saxophone gloss and featuring smooth harmonic progressions, this melody has been dismissed by Gunther Schuller as "slick trying-to-be-modern show music" (1968, 330). Schuller, though, fails to appreciate how the second theme ironically rubs against the first, adding to the play of opposites--sacred/secular and urban/rural (blues)--that so characterizes the varied piece. Much to Schuller's relief, the "sweet jazz" theme only momentarily wisps away the opening blues atmosphere, which settles down again with four blues choruses: two by Miley, one by Ellington, and one by Nanton. Whereas Ellington alludes to the harmony and character (smooth ragtime) of the second theme, Miley and Nanton evoke the spiritual of the first (Tucker 1991, 245-246). The two performers, however, switch to the major mode and, as typical of blues improvisation, rarely touch on that melody, instead indulging in a series of timbral twists and turns around common pitches. Both horn players lard their solos with trademark growling and ya-ya sounds, tones that later became part of the primitivist fantasy of "jungle music" heard in the Cotton Club.(6) The closing chorus, a call-and-response section, enhances the sacred display of the work. The passage winds down with the celebrated quotation of Chopin's "Funeral March" in the final measures.

Figure 1. Formal diagram of "Black and Tan Fantasy"

Chorus 1            Chorus 2       Choruses 3-4   Chorus 5

"Spiritual" theme   Second theme   Miley solo     Ellington solo
12-bar blues        16 bars        12-bar blues   12-bar blues
|                   |              |              |

Chorus 6       Chorus 7

Nanton solo    "Call and Response"
12-bar blues   Chopin "Funeral March"
                quotation in last four measures
               12-bar blues with two-measure extension
               |

[Example 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Miley based the opening theme on a spiritual he entitled "Hosanna" that, extending the moment of mother-child transmission that appears often in the spiritual tradition, he remembered his mother singing.(7) Yet, as Roger Pryor Dodge, a friend and chronicler of the cornetist, pointed out, the theme and its parent spiritual derive from "The Holy City," a sacred song by the white composer Stephen Adams (Dodge [1934] 1993, 108).(8) This popular song appeared not only in religious services but was also frequently performed in secular contexts. W. C. Handy (1941, 63), for instance, recalled playing the piece as a comet solo in various traveling shows. In the opening theme, Miley quotes the melody of the chorus, which repeats cries of "Hosanna"(9) (see Ex. 2). He, perhaps drawing upon some of the changes made by his mother, strikingly transforms "The Holy City": darkening the melody by shifting to the minor mode, adding syncopations, and, most conspicuously, changing its character from an ebullient sacred song to a somber blues (see Ex. 1).

[Example 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A 1934 essay on spirituals by Zora Neale Hurston sheds light on Miley and his mother's alchemization of "The Holy City." Hurston described the role of "negroised" white hymns in Southern black church services, particularly Baptist churches in New Orleans.(10) For her, these mutations belonged to a larger family of spirituals that she broadly defined as "Negro religious songs, sung by a group, and a group bent on expression of feelings and not on sound effects" (Hurston [1934] 1970, 223). In her account, African-American congregations did not merely import these hymns intact. Instead, they made them their own by severely altering them, both musically and liturgically. The words were "liquified" and the melodies "converted into a barbaric chant that is not a chant." This metamorphosis occurred most often during funerals, occasions for which, she argued, appropriate white hymns were used because blacks had no suitable songs of their own, all African-American songs being "based on a dance possible rhythm" (Hurston [1934] 1970, 223-225).

The idea of "negroidisation" (to expand upon Hurston's term) was not unknown to Ellington, who claimed that the spiritual emerged from that act.(11) Recall that the Black, Brown and Beige scenario describes the genesis of the genre in slaves "adding their own touches ... weaving melodic, harmonic, rhythmic patterns" around white hymns. From a mythic antebellum Southern past to 1920s Harlem, "Black and Tan Fantasy" does not "weave" patterns around "The Holy City" as much as transform it, recasting it into a twelve-bar blues. This blues "negroidisation" may also appear far removed from Hurston's Baptist services, but her essay and "Black and Tan Fantasy" place their metamorphosed hymns in similar settings. The jazz work elaborates upon the funerals that are briefly mentioned by Hurston, evoking those ceremonies with the dark appropriation of "The Holy City" and a Chopin eulogy.

Ellington and Miley's funeral, though, has a satiric bent that would be out of place in Hurston's ethnographic study. With its bluesy spiritual, "Black and Tan Fantasy" extends a black entertainment tradition of satirizing elements of religion. Such parodies often targeted the figure of the preacher. For instance, Louis Armstrong occasionally played the part of a minister. In "The Lonesome Road" (1931), "Reverend" Armstrong introduced the members of his flock, or band, and passed around the collection plate. Nearly a decade later, the selfless Elder Eatmore offered inspiring sermons on the evils of gossip and the virtues of generosity. Elsewhere, in a recording of "In Dat Mornin'" by Jimmie Lunceford and His Chickasaw Syncopators, Moses Allen took his gospel reading from "the Books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John" and described the Angel Gabriel blowing his trumpet, evoked by Sy Oliver's plunger-mute cries.

Miley also donned the preacher's robe. Frank M. Davis, a syndicated columnist for the Associated Negro Press, described to Marshall Stearns a show by Ellington's band at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem during the mid-1920s. Davis acknowledged that the incident might be apocryphal but claimed that it was told to him as "the gospel truth" (quoted in Tucker 1991, 247). Although "Black and Tan Fantasy" is not mentioned, it was most likely the performed piece, especially considering the use of sacred elements, the slow tempo, and "weird" sounds. The show was part of a cutting contest between Miley, the new kid in town, and Johnny Dunn, a leading New York player. Wearing a white silk tuxedo and blowing "hot jazz," Dunn was all class, but Miley offered a different look and sound:

   So just as the audience got back in their seats, the curtain rolls up
   revealing the inside of a beat-up church. There was Duke leading the band
   in one of those weird slow jobs. And off-stage, Bubber was cutting loose
   with his jungle-iron, choking and wailing like a lost soul. He walked on
   dressed like a preacher and let them have it. New York had never heard
   anything like it, the result was terrific. People stood on their seats and
   yelled. The music went over the top, and stopped while Miley bowed. It was
   the biggest thing that theatre had had for years. Somewhere in the back
   rows, Johnny Dunn walked quietly out, completely unnoticed. He never quite
   lived it down.(12) (Stearns 1937, 10)

If that floor show did feature "Black and Tan Fantasy," it would have served as a theatrical realization of the ironic play in the work. Much of that activity centered around Miley's spiritual. In consciously drawing upon what he called a spiritual, the cornetist evoked different forms of the genre, setting up an intragenre dialogue between them and "Black and Tan Fantasy." The dialogue is especially rich with the Du Boisian sorrow songs that, as mentioned previously, held sway in several areas of African-American culture, including literary and cultural writings, the concert stage, and the church. In other words, the sorrow songs maintained such a large presence that "Black and Tan Fantasy," or any presentation of a spiritual, would have to engage them.

The commentary in the jazz work, though, comes across as too pointed to be a random confrontation between it and the Du Boisian notion of the genre. "Black and Tan Fantasy" can be heard as signifying on the sorrow songs, that is, practicing the African-American tradition of drawing upon preexistent genres and works to create new versions that break away, often ironically, from the originals.(13) The signifying in the work takes the form of an ironic reversal of the sorrow songs. "Black and Tan Fantasy" rejects the restraint and musical decorum of the spiritual arrangements, which were largely modeled on European concert idioms. Instead, it charges its spiritual with a blues intensity that yields a series of bizarre sounds unheard of inside either the concert hall or church, including Miley's "choking and wailing" and Nanton's ya-yas and comical horse whinny. Even the nonspiritual borrowing in the work--Chopin's "Funeral March"--is extravagantly transformed, its muted somberness becoming an overwrought cry.

"Black and Tan Fantasy" also violates the religious and musical "purity" claimed by the sorrow songs. As described by Alain Locke, the spiritual had "completely sublimated" any secular influences that may have shaped its origins, becoming "indelibly" of an "intense religious" and essentially Christian "character." He decried the "crude and refined secularization" of the genre, proclaiming that "to call them Spirituals and to treat them otherwise is a travesty" (Locke 1925, 201). "Black and Tan Fantasy" may have earned such rebuke, so freely does it mix sacred and secular idioms. Rather than sullying the spiritual, however, the work weaves together the sacred and secular to create new stylistic blends, wrapping its spiritual in those vibrant patterns rather than in the austere ones of the sorrow songs.

Understanding "Black and Tan Fantasy" as an ironic upending of the sorrow songs reveals more affinities between it and Hurston's essay. The latter also challenged Du Bois's ideal, making some of the same basic points as "Black and Tan Fantasy." Hurston cut to the heart of the matter by questioning what she believed to be Du Bois's skewed views of the genre. First, she disputed "the idea that the whole body of spirituals are `sorrow songs,'" pointing out that they address a variety of subjects, ranging from "a peeve at gossipers to Death and Judgement." Hurston next separated the "spirituals," those songs documented in her research, from the "neo-spirituals," the arrangements for "glee clubs and concert singers" favored by Du Bois. The latter, she conceded, were "a valuable contribution to the music and literature of the world" but were not "the songs of the people as sung by them." Far from being a relic of the slave past, the spiritual was part of a living tradition in which songs "are being made and forgotten everyday" (Hurston [1934] 1970, 223-224).(14)

Removed from that tradition, Hurston believed that the sorrow songs had little life in them, lacking the sonic vitality and emotionality heard in the church services that she documented. For Hurston, the spiritual thrived in "crude" sounds, not in the smooth harmonies or mellifluous singing of the concert arrangements. "The real Negro singer," she asserted, "cares nothing about pitch," each member of the congregation chiefly aiming "to express himself through song" (Hurston [1934] 1970, 224). The result of this "every man for himself" approach was a song of "jagged harmony," "dissonances," "shifting keys," and "broken time." Hurston also described how the singers' bodies became part of the musical wreckage. Instead of concealing breathing and other means of vocal production, African Americans, according to her, exaggerated those sounds and worked them into spiritual performances, adding "explosive exhalations" and vocal "straining" to the already raging "harmony and disharmony" (224).

"Black and Tan Fantasy" also places its spiritual in a sonic storm produced by intense musical and emotional expression. Although the sounds produced by Ellington's band and Hurston's congregations cannot be directly equated, the "jagged" musicality that she described accords with "Black and Tan Fantasy": bent and smeared pitches, "strained" tones, clashing, vibrant timbre, and, as with the growling and vocal ya-yas, corporeal resonances as well. Again, the tone of the two works could not be more different--a satirical smack of blues versus passionate religious fervor--yet both display the spiritual as a site of sonic and timbral extravagance.

The connection between "Black and Tan Fantasy" and Hurston's article may be broad, but still a connection can be drawn. Both present spirituals, or "negroised" white hymns, and do so in ways that are at odds with one of the dominant views of the genre. In that way, the two raised complementary voices in the cultural arena of 1920s-early 1930s Harlem. Hurston's "voice" was part of a countermovement in the Harlem Renaissance led by her and such other young writers as Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, and Claude McKay. This youthful vanguard contested many of the ideas espoused by Du Bois and other elder figures (Lewis 1994, xxxi-xl). In particular, as with Hurston and her praise of the "living" spiritual, this group celebrated the folk and popular styles, especially blues and jazz, that had been largely dismissed by Du Bois (Ogren 1989, 117-119). Those idioms, in their opinion, served as a cultural foundation upon which young artists should build.

Ellington and Miley were not part of this group or of any organized cultural movement, for that matter. The nightclub and literary salons were distant worlds. Still, from these different fronts the musicians and writers could make cultural commentary that shared similar ideas, like the undermining of the sorrow songs. For his part, Hughes believed that common ground existed between the two worlds and that communication needed to be established between them. He described "the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith" as rich sources that had much to say and urged young artists to listen and learn from them (Hughes 1926, 693-694).

The view of "Black and Tan Fantasy" as an ironic take on the sorrow songs is one way of appreciating Miley's borrowing of a spiritual. That there are other ways of interpreting his quotation goes without saying, especially considering that it is never clear what the cornetist is quoting in the first place. "Black and Tan Fantasy" is a unique work in studies of borrowing. It presents two quotations in one: the opening chorus can be heard as incorporating either a spiritual (and a largely unknown one, at that) or a transformed version of "The Holy City." The two melodies are there to be heard, and, as evident in criticism and stagings of the work, both have been recognized.(15) Responses also differ over how to approach the borrowing: whether to perceive the melody as maintaining a presence despite all the transformations to it, or to focus on the transformations themselves and largely ignore the original, that is, becoming absorbed in the "distortion."

"Black and Tan Fantasy," compared with most contemporary jazz pieces, elicited considerable commentary, from extended reviews to a film inspired by it. Such a reception testifies to the puzzle created by the different styles and borrowings in the work: each interpretation tried to put those pieces together. One of the most compelling attempts is Dodge's 1934 essay. As mentioned previously, Dodge related Miley's claim of using a spiritual and pointed out "The Holy City" connection. Having brought up the sacred work, he could not let it go, spending much of his review trying to reveal its presence in the piece. Surprisingly, Dodge did not focus on the opening chorus but rather on Miley's solo sections, which he admitted were far removed melodically from "The Holy City" but which he still believed preserved Adams' melody, even if it could not be heard.

For Dodge, "Black and Tan Fantasy" cast a shadow: a split between the heard and unheard, between the solo choruses and "The Holy City" melody that he sensed was there. With a change of light and hymn, that shadow could be cast in the opposite direction. Dodge recalled Miley's funeral (the cornetist died at the age of 29) and how "the congregation sang Rock of Ages, and all through it [he and his wife] heard the Black and Tan [Fantasy]" ([1940] 1993, 455). Either heard or unheard, that piece captivated Dodge with its suggestion of some other music existing beyond its periphery.

Not content with merely suggesting that Adams' melody was present in Miley's solo choruses, Dodge tried to expose it. He notated solos from four performances of the piece and compared his transcriptions with "The Holy City" melody, hoping that the notes would reveal what the ear could only sense but not hear.(16) Not surprisingly, few correspondences emerged. The gap between the two, however, did not convince Dodge that the song was completely absent; rather, he explained the gap as resulting in part from the limitations of notation to capture improvisation. That caveat echoed similar statements regarding the inadequacies of notation made by transcribers of spirituals who, along with Dodge, found the incompleteness of notation fascinating. For the spiritual scholars, those inadequacies suggested "primitive" sounds tantalizingly beyond Western comprehension and script (Radano 1996, 524-544). Similarly, for Dodge, his incomplete transcriptions suggested that "The Holy City" was more "removed" than he thought, perhaps part of some "primitive" cry, thus making it even more alluring. The "vague resemblances" that he found confirmed that the "Holy City" melody was indeed there but was just beyond his reach.

What especially fascinated Dodge about "Black and Tan Fantasy" was that the melody could be so transformed as to appear simultaneously to be there and yet not there. Hurston might have referred to such a metamorphosis as an instance of "negroidisation." Her phrase is again apt not for the musical insights it offers but rather because the neologism itself captures what it describes: the bringing together of fragments--words or music of white origin--to create new compounds that declare black creativity. For Hurston, "negroidisation" yielded the new and was not beholden to the old, establishing the relationship between blackness and whiteness as one of creativity and raw material. Immediately discarded in her essay are the original white hymns, dismissed as resources and never heard from again.

Dodge, however, attempted to hold on to the white originals in "Black and Tan Fantasy" by gathering as many notated scraps of "The Holy City" as he could. Those efforts to preserve Adams' melody reveal an underlying racial dynamic in Dodge's interpretation of the work. Referring to clubs where blacks and whites mixed, the title "Black and Tan Fantasy" itself invites listeners to hear the work along racial lines, but, typical of the elusive work, it never clarifies where those lines are to be drawn or how the two races interact. Dodge drew his own line, defining the relationship between blackness and whiteness as one of distortion and purity, quite different terms than Hurston's. He described the distortion of Adams' melody as an act of theft--stealing time from some notes--and devilish tricks, including the alteration of one of Adams' b-flats to an e-natural (invoking the dreaded interval of the tritone, the diabolus in musica).

So thorough was this deformation that there was little of "The Holy City" to hold on to, and Dodge, despite finding some of these changes "wonderful," needed to hold on to some "pure" music. Looking well beyond Adams, he found that purer and more resilient music in compositions of Bach and Palestrina. In a strange move, Dodge used their works to reveal the "purity" of jazz, not an original purity but one only achieved through "resemblance" to these classics. Calling a phrase by Miley "the purest I have ever heard in jazz," Dodge immediately qualified: "I speak of purity in its resemblance to the opening of the Credo for soprano voices in Palestrina's `Missa Papae Marcelli'" ([1934] 1993, 108-109). By making Miley a copy of Palestrina, the reviewer outmaneuvered the cornetist, who may have been able to distort "The Holy City" but presumably could not transform Palestrina or Bach. At best, he could only resemble them. Although several centuries removed, purity was found, and along with it the creativity of whiteness was confirmed.

Whereas Dodge may have been the only listener of "Black and Tan Fantasy" to look over his shoulder to the distant past, he was not alone in being spellbound by the "distortion" in the work. The critic R. D. Darrell confessed to not being able to "shake off" its "twisted beauty," a phrase suggesting some mixture of distortion and purity. Describing the piece, he recited a litany of deformation: "oddity," "tortured," "agonizing," "distorted," and "perverse." Unlike Dodge, Darrell did not wrap these phrases around a borrowed hymn, although he did sense a connection to the spiritual, claiming that "Black and Tan Fantasy" "sounded an equal depth of poignance" as "the heavily worked `spiritual' tradition" ([1932] 1993, 59). As with Dodge, however, those distortions belonged to another dimension of the piece, a space not audible to the average listener, like that unheard realm in which Dodge sensed "The Holy City." For Darrell, the distortion only became apparent after he crossed over the boundary separating the "hot" and "funny" music from the "twisted beauty," a crossing his friends could not make:

   With the majority I did not recognize it when it first came to my ears in
   the form of the "hottest, funniest record you ever heard." It was a
   Brunswick disc by a dance band named the Washingtonians, and I laughed like
   everyone else over its instrumental wa-waing and gargling and gobbling, the
   piteous whinnying of a very ancient horse, the lugubrious reminiscence of
   the Chopin funeral march. But as I continued to play the record for the
   amusement of my friends I laughed less heartily and with less zest. In my
   ears the whinnies and wa-was began to resolve into new tone colors,
   distorted and tortured, but agonizingly expressive. The piece took on a
   surprising individuality and entity as well as an intensity of feeling that
   was totally incongruous in popular dance music. Beneath all its oddity and
   perverseness there was a twisted beauty that grew on me more and more and
   could not be shaken off. (Darrell [1932] 1993, 58)

That both critics focused on elements of distortion is not surprising. Miley's presentation of "The Holy City" indulges in a variety of melodic and timbral opposites that easily can be heard as an evocation of the opposition between purity and distortion. Indeed, any musician incorporating a spiritual (or "negroised" white hymn) into a jazz or blues piece would have to confront that pair, either attempting to minimize the tension between the two, or, as with Miley, exploiting it. Miley's exploitation is especially apparent in his solo choruses, the sections that captivated Dodge and Darrell.

With so few solid traces of "The Holy City," Miley's solo appears to be all distortion, but even here he evokes purity--his own, not Adams'. The high b-flat with which he begins his solo is a unique sound in the piece (see Ex. 3). Floating above the rhythm section, it has an "intense stillness" and unalloyed timbre removed from the surrounding growling and "slick" music; in other words, it is the purest sound in the piece (Schuller 1968, 330). It may not be a stretch to suggest that the heavenly register and sweetness of the pitch are timbral allusions to the borrowed spiritual.

[Example 3 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The purity of this note especially comes across when comparing "Black and Tan Fantasy" with Louis Armstrong's celebrated 1928 recording of "West End Blues." Armstrong similarly begins the final chorus with a sustained b-flat, but that pitch swells, a crescendo and timbral effusion leading directly to a spray of quickly descending four-note patterns beginning on that note. Despite a small crescendo, Miley's b-flat stays relatively peaceful, a sensation blotted out by the following ripping figure full of growls and blue notes. This "extraordinary contrast" pushes the dichotomy of purity and distortion to a level beyond the benign deformation of "The Holy City" in the opening theme-statement (Schuller 1968, 330-331).

The b-flat is not heard again; nothing so pure is heard again in the piece. Miley, however, continues to play with the idea of distortion, no longer twisting the pure but contorting the already contorted. Throughout the rest of his solo, he frequently states a brief idea, usually heavily colored by pitch and tonal inflections, and then immediately repeats it, further coloring and warping it. For instance, the blue-note streaked idea that opens his second chorus is followed by an even more daubed variant that is growled instead of wah-wahed as in the first statement (see Ex. 4). Whereas such immediate variation is common to blues performance, the technique stands out in a piece preoccupied with the transformation of melodic material and the related idea of purity and distortion. In particular, these repetitions can be heard as ripples emerging from the original distortion of the spiritual or "The Holy City."

[Example 4 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

With these broadening deformations, Miley gradually erases any suggestion of purity in the piece. The cornetist first supplants the purity of the sacred melody with his own, the high b-flat, and then dismisses the notion of purity altogether by forging a chain of distortions that connect only to each other and not to some pure original. This rejection also affects the racial interplay of the work. For Dodge and others aware of the white origins of the transformed "The Holy City" melody, that repudiation possibly struck at the larger cultural connection between whiteness and purity, a link evident in the attitudes toward miscegenation. The gradual nullification of purity ("The Holy City") and its related racial privileges may have threatened Dodge and led him to retain as much of the song as he could and, when that failed, to turn back to Bach and Palestrina.

"Black and Tan Fantasy" was not the only contemporary jazz work to draw upon "The Holy City."(17) It was, however, the only piece to make so much of its borrowings, both rhetorically and timbrally, and to absorb listeners like Dodge and Darrell to such a degree. Engaging in the one-upmanship typical of signifying, Ellington and Miley distanced themselves from these other works by showing that they could use similar materials in much more imaginative, and often critical, ways. Recorded in 1923 by King Oliver and His Creole Jazz Band, "Chimes Blues" also incorporates the refrain from "The Holy City," similarly transforming it into a twelve-bar blues. Oliver, however, maintains the major mode of the original (C major in this recording) and presents the melody as a contrasting idea within the piece rather than as an opening theme. Appearing a year after the first recording of "Black and Tan Fantasy," Johnny Dodds' "Weary City" turns the tables on the popular piece and responds to it. The title makes clear that some jazz musicians were familiar with Adams' melody and thus perhaps recognized its appearance in "Black and Tan Fantasy." In his work, Dodds opens and closes with brief C-major quotations of "The Holy City," bookends to a succession of melodically unrelated blues choruses.

These are slight differences compared with those in overall sound and expression between the two works and "Black and Tan Fantasy." Relying on a superficial contrast between sacred and secular, Oliver's and Dodds' straightforward quotations snicker "look what tune popped up here." "Black and Tan Fantasy," on the other hand, boasts "look what's happened to that tune," fascinating listeners, like Dodge, with its distortions and play of opposites. Neither "Chimes Blues" nor "Weary City" steps into that timbral hall of mirrors, satisfied instead with conventional yet involving blues and group improvisation. The two also do not indulge in the "sacred" elements heard in "Black and Tan Fantasy," be it the impassioned call-and-response chorus or the funereal atmosphere. With peals of C-major bells, "Chimes Blues" gets closer to the church than "Weary City," but both still remain outside. "Black and Tan Fantasy," though, is inside, using a rhetorical command of sacred and secular elements not possessed by the other two works to engage in ironic play and alluring distortions.

As heard in "Weary City," "Black and Tan Fantasy" quickly went from doing the signifying to being signified upon.(18) Joining Dodds in the game was not another jazz musician but a white-run movie studio, RKO Productions. In 1929, the studio released Black and Tan, a short starring Ellington and His Cotton Club Orchestra and the actress-dancer Fredi Washington.(19) The film's director was Dudley Murphy, whose interest in African-American culture shaped some of his other work, including St. Louis Blues (1929) and The Emperor Jones (1933).(20) The film Black and Tan builds around a performance of the title work, a fleeting story of romantic sacrifice and a gorged mise-en-scene, both of which elaborate upon thematics discussed in this essay: primitivism, the spiritual, distortion, and death. Just as "Black and Tan Fantasy" rearranged fragments heard in other jazz pieces in new and more intriguing patterns, the film collected elements of the Ellington work and African-American culture that had fascinated the public and tried to combine them in an even more fascinating package.(21)

The strains of "Black and Tan Fantasy" that open the film emerge not from a splashy nightclub but rather from a sparse apartment where Ellington and Arthur Whetsol (a replacement for Miley, who had left the band in February 1929) are practicing the newly composed piece. Their rehearsal is interrupted by two movers, played as minstrel buffoons, who have come to repossess the piano.(22) Washington rushes in and saves Ellington and his instrument by luring the movers away with liquor. She then tells Ellington that she just landed a job at a club and that he and his band are to play there. Ellington, though, reminds her that she cannot take the job because of her bad heart. But in bad or good health, that heart loves Ellington, and the show must go on.

The next scene opens at the swank nightclub. Ellington's concerns have proven warranted. A fatigued Washington sits slumped in a chair, watching the preceding act from the wings, and the kaleidoscopic camera shots of the stage show suggest her blurred vision.(23) Called by the emcee, she bursts on stage and frenetically hoofs to Ellington and his band in "Cotton Club Stomp." That stomp, however, stops when Washington collapses. The emcee orders the stage hands to "get her out of here" and for the worried Ellington "to keep the show on." The Cotton Club Girls enter to distract the audience. Ellington, however, abruptly stops the show, and he and the band leave.

The final scene reveals a chorus gathered around Washington's deathbed singing the spiritual "Same Train." She turns to Ellington and says, "Play me the `Black and Tan Fantasy'." Joined by the chorus, Ellington and his band oblige. The work entrances Washington, pulling her heavenward. With the quotation of Chopin's "Funeral March," she takes her last breath, but not before turning for one last look at Ellington. A tear winds down his face as the camera fades out.

Although touching, this melodrama was not what drew audiences to the film. The marquees hyped the Cotton Club Orchestra and "jungle syncopation," sounds and sites about which most curious moviegoers had only read. The film did not disappoint. Not only did it present a glitzy stage that could be found in a spot like the Cotton Club, but it offered a primitivist spectacle, including the advertised "primal" rhythms as well as the trademark "jungle" dress, the scant feather and bead outfits worn by Washington and the chorus girls. Another atavistic stroke was Washington's death, which, echoing Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, results from the inability of the dancer--or any human being--to keep pace with the barbaric music. "Black and Tan Fantasy" notably plays no role in the rite of the Cotton Club. The band does not perform the number during the nightclub scene, only in the opening apartment and closing deathbed shots. The film, however, still uses the number to primitivist effect. Whereas the apartment scene is largely free from such associations, the closing vigil plays them up, trading in the jungle for the "primitivism" of African-American folklife. The heartfelt performance of the spiritual suggests a distant, rural past, one far removed from the city jazz life.(24) As a manifestation of that life, "Black and Tan Fantasy" may seem out of place in this scene, but the piece intensifies this "primitive" piety by conveying the emotionality and atavistic sounds that were considered part of black worship.

Be it in the folk past or urban jungle, the film links the "primitive" with distortion. The nightclub scenes feature swirling shots and strange camera angles that evoke Washington's hallucinations. The camera work, though, may also present the audience's perspective, not the blurred vision resulting from fatigue but rather the delirium and ecstacy produced by the overflowing sensuality of the nightclub, a site where bodies and music take on new shapes and sounds. In the deathbed scene, far away from the club, the choristers' and bandmembers' bodies also metamorphose, becoming huge silhouettes projected against the back wall (see Fig. 2). With this exaggerated shadow play, Murphy visually captures the distortions heard by Darrell and Dodge. In the director's realization, these "twisted" sounds are beyond the capabilities of human musicians, emanating instead from looming shadows.

[Figure 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As a prelude to those shadowy tones, the choir sings the spiritual "Same Train." With an illustrious pedigree, the cinematic version of that song exemplifies the elite Harlem Renaissance ideal of the genre. First, it clearly derives from the arrangement of the spiritual by J. Rosamond Johnson in James Weldon Johnson's Second Book of Negro Spirituals ([1926] 1962), part of one of the most significant collections of the Renaissance. Furthering Du Bois's efforts to enshrine the genre, that work defined the spiritual as "the finest distinctive artistic contribution [America] has to offer the world" (Johnson [1925] 1962, 13).(25) Although no arranger is credited, Johnson most likely adapted his arrangement for the film. A month earlier, he had worked on Murphy's St. Louis Blues, which incorporated the same choir and many of the same actors, and he probably followed that troupe to the new project. As with his other spiritual arrangements, this one avoids the "barbarisms" that thrilled Hurston, cultivating instead a timbral and harmonic smoothness. The Hall Johnson Choir realized this suavity in the film performance. The group, one of the leading Harlem Choirs, was another force in the promotion of the spiritual, organized "for the purpose of preserving and performing the traditional Negro music in the style of its original creators" (Stratemann 1992, 10).

By juxtaposing the blue-blood "Same Train" with "Black and Tan Fantasy," the film places the two different presentations of a spiritual in a dialogue. Whether either Murphy or Ellington planned this intragenre commentary is doubtful, yet the fortuitous union offered something for each of them. For Murphy, following a spiritual by an intense piece that mixes sacred and secular elements and is full of evocative sounds only served to enhance the primitivist spectacle of African-American folklife and worship. As with the possible earlier Harlem performance featuring Miley, the cinematic pairing allowed Ellington to bring out the spiritual roots of "Black and Tan Fantasy."(26) That connection made, the work proceeds to separate itself from and eclipse "Same Train," claiming its own sonic and emotional realms. As discussed above, the distorted timbres, precarious pitches, and blues intensity of the piece conform more with Hurston's heretical views of the spiritual than with the established ones of Du Bois or J. Rosamond Johnson.

Inspired by either Ellington and Miley's ironic reversal of the sorrow songs or Murphy's primitivist notions, the film, not surprisingly, favors Hurston's view.(27) So does Washington. She cuts off "Same Train" to make her last request, feeling the need for something more fervent than the spiritual's doleful locomotive to carry her into the next world. Banished by her, "Same Train" is not heard from again, but, perhaps in an attempt to preserve its presence, Johnson, or possibly even Ellington, has the choir sing during the performance of "Black and Tan Fantasy." The group, for instance, doubles the altered melody of "The Holy City" in the opening chorus. This gesture evokes the church origins of that melody, but, at the same time, it reveals how far "Black and Tan Fantasy" has distanced itself from both "The Holy City" and the just heard "Same Train." The choir cannot match the growling timbre of the cornet melody. Indeed, the choir's lustrous sound comes across as a distraction that threatens to drown out the more colorful instrumental line. Equally intrusive is the added text, which has largely been rendered incomprehensible on the soundtrack. Clear or not, the text would be irrelevant because it most likely could not create as strong an impression on the listener as Miley's (Whetsol's) snarling minor-mode transformation of the original melody.(28)

The disparity between the jazz work and the spiritual grows larger with the second theme. In this most secular and urban patch of the Ellington piece, the chorus continues with its evocation of the spiritual, overlaying a new melody and sacred text on that theme. This interpolation sounds like an attempt to convert the "sweet" jazz melody or, at least, to cover it up. Such proselytization fails, and the choir remains silent during the solo choruses; no arranger would dare encroach on the horn players' timbral displays. When the choir does return, it is no longer in the mode of "Same Train" but rather on the terms of "Black and Tan Fantasy." The voices, for instance, fill out the call-and-response chorus, making it even more evocative of an ebullient church service, not a polished concert version. Finally, the added choral part for the Chopin tag enhances the mockery of that quotation. The interpolated text--it sounds like the old "Pray for the Dead, and the Dead will pray for you"--conveys that "gallows-humor" that Ralph Ellison so loved in this quotation, which he considered "most Negro American in its mock[ery]" ([1969] 1993, 395-396).

The end of the film, however, is most "Hollywood" in its melodrama: the drawn-out death of a young woman who has sacrificed her life so that her boyfriend could get his big break. That is what is to be expected from a mainstream motion picture; what is not expected is the film's commentary on the spiritual. As already indicated, the last scene stages a dialogue between the spiritual in "Black and Tan Fantasy" and the sorrow songs, one in which the former has the last word. That exchange can be heard as complementing a larger debate within the Harlem Renaissance over the nature and performance of spirituals and other African-American idioms. Shedding light on the relationship of "Black and Tan Fantasy" to that debate not only provides a cultural context for the piece but also reveals the work's rhetorical virtuosity, the ability to create a variety of effects and sensations, many of which--irony, fervent blues, and "twisted" beauty"--are as beguiling now as then.

For their advice and encouragement, I would like to thank Krin Gabbard, Richard Kurth, Vera Micznik, Tom Riis, Wayne Shirley, and Willie Strong. Much thanks to Alan Matheson for his valuable repertoire suggestions and to Annie Kuebler for her assistance with materials in the Duke Ellington Collection, Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. I am also especially grateful to Mark Tucker for his thoughtful reading of the essay and his perspicacious and helpful comments.

(1.) For a discussion of the Black, Brown and Beige scenario typescript and an earlier draft, see Tucker (1993a, 76-80).

(2.) The focus on Du Bois is not intended to diminish other writers and performers of the spiritual. But Du Bois's essay solidified much of the earlier celebrations of the genre, including performances of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and writings of Frederick Douglass (The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass), and influenced such subsequent authors as Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson, who are discussed below.

(3.) Ellington first publicly mentioned such a historical work in 1930. The following year, he referred directly to the movement by comparing his intentions "to portray the experiences of the coloured races" with the efforts of the Renaissance poet Countee Cullen and "others in literature" (Ellington [1931] 1993). Later that decade, the piece became a planned opera entitled Boola but was then reconceived in its final form of a large-scale instrumental composition, which Ellington struggled to find the time to complete. On the long history of the work and Ellington's relationship to the Harlem Renaissance, see Tucker (1993a; 1993b).

(4.) Between "Black and Tan Fantasy" and Black, Brown and Beige, Ellington performed another work featuring spirituals. In 1933, he and his orchestra recorded "Dear Old Southland," a 1921 song by the African-American composer/lyricist pair Turner Layton and Henry Creamer. This piece stitches together the melodies of "Deep River" and "Sometimes Feel Like a Motherless Child." The added text features such vaudeville-minstrel touches as "my old Kentucky home," "the Swanee shore," "Mammy Jimmy," and "pickaninnies." Ellington and his band discarded the minstrel hokum (in his brief vocal solo, Louis Bacon avoids these phrases, settling instead for such untainted ones as "I want to be" and "I love to see") and turned the song into an essentially jazzed-up version of spirituals. That combination of idioms comes across as rather superficial compared with the thick stylistic mix in "Black and Tan Fantasy." "Dear Old Southland" also lacks the ironic tone created by the friction of sacred and secular elements in the earlier piece, nor does it engage in the same level of "distortion" or suggest shadowy musical realms, proof that it is very unlikely that the solos in this work would have ever inspired the musings of Dodge and Darrell discussed below. Ellington later recorded a piano solo version of the song (May 14, 1941). "Dear Old Southland" was recorded by other jazz artists, most famously by Louis Armstrong and elsewhere by James E Johnson, Coleman Hawkins, and Benny Goodman and His Orchestra.

(5.) This article focuses on the Victor recording (October 26, 1927) featuring Miley as soloist. The Ellington band recorded the piece several more times in the next few years. "Black and Tan Fantasy" actually remained in the band's repertory and later appeared in new arrangements.

(6.) This essay will not focus on the "jungle music" associations of the piece. For those unfamiliar with the term, jazz was considered by many to be a "primitive" music that purportedly drew upon melodies, rhythms, and sounds (such as the sonic bizarreries in "Black and Tan Fantasy") from the African jungle. This "primal" music was a source of sexual stimulation and also a wellspring of vigor from which etiolated white audiences could draw. For a delightful satire of this view, see Langston Hughes' short story "Rejuvenation through Joy" ([1934] 1990, 69-98). For a discussion of these associations, see Watkins (1994, 187-195). Lisa Barg discussed how Ellington and other African-American artists could use "jungle music" as a mask in her paper "Re-visioning the Jungle in Duke Ellington's Black and Tan Fantasy." This paper is part of her dissertation in progress at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

(7.) For another instance of such transmission, see Du Bois (1903, 254).

(8.) Stephen Adams was the pseudonym for British composer and singer Michael Maybrick (1844-1913).

(9.) Quotation in jazz has received little attention. An insightful discussion of the topic can be found in Gabbard (1991).

(10.) In her essay, Hurston only twice identifies the services that she is describing, referring once to an anonymous "Baptist church in New Orleans" and then more specifically to the Second Zion Baptist Church in that city. It is unclear if all the activities in her account occurred in those churches or elsewhere.

(11.) The emphasis placed on Hurston's and Ellington's discussions of African-American transformations of white sacred music is not to suggest that they were the only two familiar with that practice. Quite the contrary; they were simply elaborating upon a long and ongoing tradition, as exemplified in the black appropriations of hymns by Isaac Watts.

(12.) Another account of the performance is presented in Tucker (1991, 248).

(13.) The now classic text on this rhetorical practice is Gates (1988). Studies of signifying in jazz include Floyd (1991), Tomlinson (1991), Walser (1993), and Monson (1994).

(14.) Hurston's corrective was accepted by some Renaissance writers. Alain Locke, for instance, found division between spirituals and neospirituals to be "useful" (1936, 21).

(15.) A third possibility, and a likely scenario, is that the listener will not recognize a quotation but will still sense some sort of sacred quality. For instance, in the review discussed below, R. D. Darrell mentions a vague connection between "Black and Tan Fantasy" and the spiritual tradition.

(16.) Dodge includes in his transcriptions solos by Nanton and Jabbo Smith. The latter he mistakenly took for Miley; he later acknowledged his error, however ([1934] 1993).

(17.) "Black and Tan Fantasy" also shares with other works the evocation of a funeral march, be it the Chopin quotation in its final measures or the allusions to the hymn "Flee as a Bird" in Jelly Roll Morton's "Dead Man Blues."

(18.) It should be noted that several later jazz musicians, notably Jimmie Lunceford and Thelonious Monk, did their own takes on "Black and Tan Fantasy."

(19.) For background and discussion of the film, see Cripps (1977), Stratemann (1992), and Gabbard (1996).

(20.) The famous negrophile Carl Van Vechten, author of the controversial novel Nigger Heaven, most likely worked behind the scenes of the film. A publicity shot shows Murphy, Ellington, and Van Vechten standing over Washington's collapsed body (Cripps 1977, 232). The scenario of the film contains some Van Vechten touches. For instance, the transparent mirror dance floor appearing in the club shots is reminiscent of a similar floor used in a nightclub referred to only as "hell" in Nigger Heaven. On that floor, a girl also dies, killing herself with a knife rather than dancing herself to death as Washington does in the film. As mentioned below, that dancing death suggests Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, the controversial 1913 Parisian premiere of which Van Vechten attended. Another possible connection is the use of the "Same Train" spiritual arrangement by J. Rosamond Johnson discussed below. This arrangement is dedicated to Van Vechten in James Weldon Johnson's collection ([1926] 1962).

(21.) The film was released to both black and white audiences. Stratemann (1992, 12) mentions that it was reviewed favorably by the black press and received screening in black neighborhoods throughout the 1930s.

(22.) Gabbard (1996, 163-166) discusses the variety of racial representations in the film, which range from minstrel types to Ellington as the polished professional musician.

(23.) The innovative camera work in the film builds upon the techniques used in Ballet mecanique (1924), an avant-garde film by Murphy and painter Fernand Leger to the celebrated score of George Antheil.

(24.) Gabbard (1996, 166) also describes how this scene presents a "folkloric" view of African Americans.

(25.) For the arrangement of "Same Train," see Johnson ([1926] 1962, 60-62).

(26.) Miley and Ellington's backwoods scene, or, more accurately, Stearns' account of it, obviously comes close to the folk backdrop in the primitivist mise-en-scene of the film. This affinity demonstrates how the lines between black self-representations and white racial fantasies were not always that clear because, in this case, the satirical excess of the Harlem performance could spill over into the latter.

(27.) Hurston's emphasis on "crude" sounds makes her essay a target for primitivist fantasies, like those in Murphy's final scene. Not surprisingly, her essay was grouped in the Cunard Negro collection with George Antheil's article "The Negro on the Spiral or a Method of Negro Music," a primitivist account of black styles. These affiliations reveal how difficult it was for black self-representations, no matter how assertive and "authentic," not to be entangled in such fantasies.

(28.) Miley had so imprinted his interpretation of the solo on the piece that almost all soloists after him, including Whetsol, imitated his style.

DISCOGRAPHY

Armstrong, Louis. Elder Eatmore's sermon on generosity. Decca 15043 (1938).

--. Elder Eatmore's sermon on throwing stones. Decca 15043 (1938).

Austin, Gene, and Nat Shilkret. The lonesome road. Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra. Okeh 41538 (1931).

Ellington, Edward Kennedy ("Duke"), and Bubber Miley. Black and tan fantasy. Victor 21137 (1927).

Layton, Turner, and Henry Creamer. Dear old southland. Edward Kennedy ("Duke") Ellington and His Orchestra. Victor 24501 (1933).

--. Dear old southland. Edward Kennedy ("Duke") Ellington. Victor 27564 (1941).

Lunceford, Jimmie. In dat mornin'. Victor 38141 (1930).

Oliver, Joseph "King." Chimes blues. Gennett 5135 (1923).

Oliver, Joseph "King," and Clarence Williams. West end blues. Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. Okeh 8597 (1928).

Weary city. Johnny Dodds' Washboard Band. Victor 38004 (1928).

REFERENCES

Barg, Lisa D. 1995. Re-visioning the jungle in Duke Ellington's Black and Tan Fantasy. Paper read at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, November 2-5, New York.

Cripps, Thomas. 1977. Slow fade to black: The Negro in American film, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford University Press.

Darrell, R. D. [1932] 1993. Black beauty. In The Duke Ellington reader, edited by Mark Tucker, 57-65. New York: Oxford University Press.

Dodge, Roger Pryor. [1934] 1993. Harpsichords and jazz trumpets. In The Duke Ellington reader, edited by Mark Tucker, 105-110. New York: Oxford University Press.

--. [1940] 1993. Bubber. In The Duke Ellington reader, edited by Mark Tucker, 454-458. New York: Oxford University Press.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1903. The souls of black folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg.

Ellington, Edward Kennedy ("Duke"). n.d. Black, Brown and Beige typescript. Duke Ellington Collection, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

--. [1931] 1993. The Duke steps out. In The Duke Ellington reader, edited by Mark Tucker, 46-50. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ellison, Ralph. [1969] 1993. Homage to Duke Ellington on his birthday. In The Duke Ellington reader, edited by Mark Tucker, 394-399. New York: Oxford University Press.

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 1991. Ring shout! Literary studies, historical studies, and black music inquiry. Black Music Research Journal 11, no. 2:265-287.

Gabbard, Krin. 1991. The quoter and his culture. In Jazz in mind: Essays on the history and meanings of jazz, edited by Reginald T. Buckner and Steven Weitland, 92-111. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press.

--. 1996. Jammin' at the margins: Jazz and the American cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The signifying monkey: A theory of African-American literary criticism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Handy, W. C. 1941. The father of the blues. New York: Macmillan.

Hughes, Langston. 1926. The Negro artist and the racial mountain. The Nation 122 (June 23): 693-694.

--. [1934] 1990. Rejuvenation through joy. In The ways of white folks, 69-98. New York: Vintage.

Hurston, Zora Neale. [1934] 1970. Spirituals and neo-spirituals. In Negro: An anthology, edited by Nancy Cunard, 223-225. New York: Frederick Ungar.

Johnson, James Weldon, ed. [1925] 1962. The book of American Negro spirituals. New York: Viking.

--. [1926] 1962. The second book of Negro spirituals. New York: Viking.

Lewis, David Levering, ed. 1994. The portable Harlem Renaissance reader. New York: Viking.

Locke, Alain. 1925. The Negro spirituals. In The new Negro: An interpretation, edited by Alain Locke, 199-210. New York: A. and C. Boni.

--. 1936. The Negro and his music. Washington, D.C.: Associates of Negro Education.

Monson, Ingrid. 1994. Doubleness and jazz improvisation: Irony, parody, and ethnomusicology. Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2 (Winter):283-313.

Ogren, Kathy J. 1989. The jazz revolution: Twenties America and the meaning of jazz. New York: Oxford University Press.

Radano, Ronald. 1995. Soul texts and the blackness of folk. Modernism/Modernity 2:71-95.

--. 1996. Denoting difference: The writing of the slave spirituals. Critical Inquiry 22, no. 3 (Spring):506--544.

Schuller, Gunther. 1968. Early jazz: Its roots and musical development. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stearns, Marshall. 1937. Bubber Miley's jungle iron, choking and sobbing fades Dunn. Down Beat 4 (June):10.

Stratemann, Klaus. 1992. Duke Ellington: Day by day and film by film. Copenhagen: Jazz-Media ApS.

Sundquist, Eric J. 1993. To wake the nation: Race in the making of American literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Tomlinson, Gary. 1991. Cultural dialogics and jazz: A white historian signifies. Black Music Research Journal 11, no. 2:229-264.

Tucker, Mark. 1991. Ellington: The early years. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

--. 1993a. The genesis of Black, Brown and Beige. Black Music Research Journal 13, no. 2:67-86.

--. 1993b. The Renaissance education of Duke Ellington. In Black music in the Harlem Renaissance: A collection of essays, edited by Samuel A. Floyd Jr., 111-127. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990. Reprint, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Walser, Robert. 1993. Out of notes: Signification, interpretation, and the problem of Miles Davis. Musical Quarterly 77, no. 2:343-365.

Watkins, Glenn. 1994. Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, culture, and collage from Stravinsky to the postmodernists. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

DAVID METZER is an assistant professor of music at the University of British Columbia. This essay is part of a larger study of quotation in twentieth-century music. He has had articles published in the Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society.