Rewriting the Narrative One Arrangement at a Time: Duke Ellington and "Rhapsody in Blue"

This essay considers the role that arrangements of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue performed by Duke Ellington and his ensemble play in the construction of historical narratives about concert jazz. On their own, both the Rhapsody and Ellington appear to perform well-established roles: the Rhapsody remains the quintessential example of “symphonic jazz” in now-loaded definitions of the term and Ellington's output in this arena—often referred to by jazz scholars as “extended jazz composition”—forms a counter-narrative. Accordingly, a racialized barrier between the black, “authentic” extended jazz compositions of Ellington and the white, “inauthentic” symphonic jazz of Gershwin has emerged in critical and scholarly accounts of these traditions. However, when Ellington and the Rhapsody are considered in tandem, these barriers become more complex and permeable. Here, I consider three arrangements that survive in the Duke Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The arrangements performed in 1925 and 1932 remove long-held assumptions that the Rhapsody was the provenience of white bands and provide insight into Ellington's own development of concertized jazz. The third version was recorded for Ellington's 1963 album Will Big Bands Ever Come Back? Musical choices made within this latter arrangement align with then-present expectations of how the Ellington band of an earlier era should have sounded. Given Ellington's demonstrated interest in musical-historical narratives, I posit that specific decisions were made with respect to instrumentation and improvisation in an attempt to secure his place within the remapping of jazz history that occurred during the 1960s.