Crowe, Lana; (2025) 'More than jazz and jiving': Duke Ellington's parallel of the arts. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Lana Crowe PhD dissertation.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 October 2026. Download (1MB)

Abstract

This dissertation argues that jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington (1899–1974) used words and music in ‘parallel’ to imbue his innovative compositional palette with extra-musical meaning. My introduction will situate Ellington’s parallels – often written in collaboration with his longtime writing partner, Billy Strayhorn (1915–67) – within the traditions of programmatic music and black sonic resistance. Chapter one examines the instrumental music composed by Ellington that he described as having an extra-musical referent in on-stage introductions, concert programmes, liner notes and interviews, from his ‘tone parallel to the history of the Negro’, Black, Brown and Beige (1943), to depictions of Harlem and suites inspired by tours abroad. Chapter two studies Ellington as a (spoken) vocal performer, considering his dialectical and rhetoric style, as well as works in which he used his speaking voice, from reciting words in songs to acting as a narrator in self-penned works of theatre; I will pay sustained attention to his and Strayhorn’s ‘parallel to the history of jazz’ and music-narration hybrid album, A Drum Is a Woman (1957). The remaining chapters explore Ellington and Strayhorn’s Such Sweet Thunder (1957), in which twelve movements ‘parallel in miniature’ moments from Shakespeare’s dramatic works. Chapter three is an introduction to the suite, its story, and how it works as a parallel. Chapter four examines the title movement ‘Such Sweet Thunder’, which, despite drawing its title from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a parallel to Othello: I will address the Shakespearean text, Ellington’s romanticised on-stage reimagining of the text, and listen to the music’s resonances with the band’s earlier ‘jungle style’ in light of the text and its contemporary contexts. Chapter five will follow a similar structure in relation to the Antony and Cleopatra parallel ‘Half the Fun’, considering its exoticising music alongside the afterlives of Cleopatra in the twentieth-century USA. I will conclude by evaluating what light the parallel sheds on Ellington’s vision of black life in America.

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