Black, Brown and Beige New York Performances

First heard in New York at Carnegie Hall in 1943, Duke Ellington’s *Black, Brown and Beige* is a long-form jazz suite that traces African American history in sound. Written for the concert stage, it argues that big-band music can carry narrative, scale, and moral weight usually reserved for European concert traditions. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra under Wynton Marsalis performs the suite with guest vocalist Catherine Russell, whose repertory work adds period texture. One hears Ellington treating jazz not as diversion, but as testimony.