Selections from the Sacred Concerts

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, DC, on April 29, 1899, and died in New York City on May 24, 1974.

Ellington conceived the first Sacred Concert program at the request of Dean C.J. Bartlett and the Reverend John S. Yaryan for performance at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral on September 16, 1965. Previously composed numbers included the spiritual Come Sunday and a solo piano version (played by Ellington) of New World A-Coming. Along with Ellington and his band, featured performers included the Grace Cathedral Choir, Herman McCoy Choir, and vocal soloists Esther Marrow, Jimmy McPhail, and Jon Hendricks. (The movements included in the “official” recording released by RCA, Duke Ellington’s Concert of Sacred Music, made in Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church on December 26, 1965, vary from the original.) The numbers “Ain’t but the One” and “Tell Me” are from this program.

Ellington created the Second Sacred Concert for Manhattan’s Cathedral of Saint John the Divine at the invitation of Bishop Horace W.B. Donegan. The performance took place January 19, 1968, at the Cathedral. (A studio recording made in January/February 1968 was released as Second Sacred Concert.) The Saint John’s premiere, in addition to Ellington and his band, included the African Methodist Episcopal Mother Zion Church Choir, the Choirs of Saint Hilda’s and Saint Hugh’s School, the men of the Cathedral Choir, and solo vocalists Alice Babs, Devonne Gardner, Jimmy McPhail, and Tony Watkins. Includes the numbers “Heaven” and “Something ’bout Believing.”

The Third Sacred Concert program was premiered at London’s Westminster Abbey on October 24, 1973; a recording was released in 1975. The performance featured Ellington and his band with the John Alldis Choir and vocal soloists Alice Babs and Tony Watkins. Includes “Ain’t Nobody Nowhere Nothin’ Without God,” “My Love,” and “The Majesty of God.”

In Charles Floyd’s adaptation, the present Sacred Concert excerpts are scored for vocal soloist(s) and vocal ensemble with an orchestra of 3 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 2 alto saxophones, 2 tenor saxophones, baritone saxophone, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (2 players: vibraphone, wind chimes, cymbals, shaker, maracas, claves, tambourine, congas), rhythm section of piano, double bass, and drum set, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

“Man prays to God in his own language and there is no language God does not understand.”

Duke Ellington penned these words in his 1973 autobiography Music Is My Mistress. Written eight years after he wrote the first of three large scale religious works, these words could easily be interpreted as the reflections of a man facing his mortality. However, when read through the musical/cultural lens of Ellington’s vast catalog, they offer us insight into the sacrality or sacred consciousness of a man whose life and music challenged conventional definitions of Blackness, artistry, genre, and worship.

While the lifestyle of the jazz musician is often viewed as being antithetical to the standard of Christian living, Ellington’s recollections challenge these assumptions. They point to a developed theological perspective and spiritual consciousness whose roots extend back to his formative years. Ellington’s Sundays were split between the Methodist and Baptist churches his mother and father attended respectively. Regular church attendance did not extend into adulthood, but Ellington was known to read the Bible voraciously. “Now I can say openly what I have been saying to myself on my knees,” he wrote when recounting his decision to accept an invitation to present a concert of sacred music at Grace (Episcopal) Cathedral in 1965. The resulting concert strongly illuminated how the sacred underscored the cultural and musical narratives heard in Ellington’s music.

The sacrality or spiritual consciousness of Duke Ellington was always present, but often went unrecognized. This was largely because it was nested in the growls, moans, bent harmonies, and magnetic rhythms that were elemental to the Ellington sound. Symmetries between these sounds and Black sacred music practices were rarely acknowledged. However, they pointed to the symbiotic relationship that existed between Saturday night and Sunday morning, and the sacred and the secular in Black expressive culture. Furthermore, the messages of transcendence, hope, and resilience that saturated Ellington’s music linked him to a theology of liberation that, while birthed in the Black Church, stretched beyond that cultural space, and mobilized both intellectuals and believers to fight for social change, civil rights, and racial reconciliation. Liberation theology informed the narrative of Ellington’s Black, Brown, and Beige, a composition that not only linked the composer to the Black symphonic aesthetic that emerged in the Harlem Renaissance, but also to the form of cultural nationalism that permeated the mid-20th-century Black civil rights struggle. 

Ellington’s coupling of liberation theology, Black sacred music practices, and jazz became clearer in 1958, when he persuaded celebrated gospel singer Mahalia Jackson to record “Come Sunday,” a section of the composition Black, Brown, and Beige that represented the sacrality of Black America. The collaboration transformed the reverent, emotive melody into a prayer that Black America had yet to realize that it would need. 

The world and jazz were quickly changing as the 1950s ended. The expansion of the anti-segregation movement throughout the South coupled with developing anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia, and the growing threat of nuclear war with Russia shaped America’s political and social perspectives during the early 1960s. They also imprinted the rhetoric and music of many Black jazz musicians. Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s Freedom Now Suite, Mary Lou Williams’s Hymn in Honor of St. Martin De Porres, and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme reflected the wave of cultural nationalism, spirituality, and resistance that permeated jazz culture during this period. 

Ellington’s entrance into this cultural dialogue was not without careful negotiation of the social and cultural fault lines. This was exemplified by his initial rejection the invitation to give a concert of sacred music as part of a year-long celebration of the consecration of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in 1965. For Ellington, the issue was not a question of musical or compositional ability, but the sanctity and cultural weight of the commission. This was not going to be the typical concert at a nightclub, concert hall, or theater. This was church, and regardless of how Ellington’s lifestyle and music were read by the general public, he still had a reverence for God and the sanctity of worship. When pressed by Rev. C. Julian Bartlett, Dean of the Cathedral, and the Right Rev. James A. Pike, Bishop of California, to reconsider, Ellington entered a period of prayer, contemplation, and consecration. It was only after hearing the story of a juggler that offered his talent to God, despite it being viewed by others as inappropriate, that Ellington accepted the commission. 

He began working on music during the summer of 1965, and made a conscious decision not to mirror the approaches of his friend and peer Mary Lou Williams, who had years earlier started composing religious music. Steeped in the Catholic tradition, Williams used liturgical terms like “hymn” and “mass” to identify her compositions. More importantly, these works were strongly reflective of the theological and musical practices that framed post-Vatican II worship. Instead, Ellington chose to employ a more universal language, using “sacred concert” as the modifier for his religious composition. He intended the terminology to denote that worship, and not religious dogma or denominational identity, were central to the identity of the work.

Ellington’s first concert of sacred music was a compendium of Black cultural expression combining elements of spirituals with jazz, blues, gospel, dance, and poetry. It included some original numbers, but a significant portion constituted previous compositions such as “Come Sunday” and New World A-Coming. Vocal selections performed by a choir and soloists were interspersed with instrumental movements that emphasized the sovereignty of God, recounted biblical stories of worship (i.e., David dancing before the Lord recounted in 2 Samuel, chapter 6), and stressed man’s connection to the Divine. The performance garnered both criticism and acclaim. Months later, in December 1965, Ellington revisited the work, performing at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York. Newspapers covering the event declared the work as representative of the “Ecumenical Ellington.” 

In the years that followed the debut and recording of the first Sacred Concert, Ellington evolved in his compositional perspective, shifting away from a suite of loosely connected numbers to conceive his ecumenical works in a more holistic fashion. He found both muse and vessel for his musical ideas in the Swedish singer Alice Babs. Her voice served as the important throughline that connected the second and third Sacred Concerts.

The second Sacred Concert was premiered in 1968 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and the third, often referred to as “The Majesty of God,” five years later at Westminster Abbey in London. Babs, Ellington, and saxophonist Harry Carney were the focal points of the latter, which took on a more contemplative tone than the first two works. This may have been due to Ellington’s awareness of his impending death. Only a year earlier he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. As the cancer advanced, he grew weaker and thinner. Edward Kennedy Ellington died less than a year after this performance.

In the years that followed Ellington’s death in 1974, the Sacred Concerts have rarely been performed in their entirety. One of the surprising dynamics that frames the performance history of these compositions surrounds how Black churches perceived them. Despite Ellington’s strong invocation in these works of the liberation ideology that underscored the relationship between the Black Church and the Black civil rights struggle, Black congregations overwhelmingly refused to see the Sacred Concerts as a pure form of liturgical music. There were a few exceptions, but for most jazz was the Devil’s music and could not be separated from this cultural history. This no doubt troubled and confounded Ellington—a man who had devoted his music to the celebration of all aspects of Black identity and Black life. 

In spite of this rejection, Ellington believed until his last days that his music—both sacred and secular—was an offering to God. He wrote the following: 

I believe that no matter how highly skilled a drummer or saxophonist might be, if this is the thing he does best, and he offers it sincerely from the heart in—or as accompaniment to—his worship, he will not be unacceptable because of lack of skill or of the instrument upon which he makes his demonstration, be it pipe or tom-tom.

Tammy Kernodle 

Tammy L. Kernodle is a musicologist and the author of Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, now in a 2nd edition from the University of Illinois Press (2020).