Ellington, Duke

The works of Alvin Ailey have been largely overlooked by musicologists interested in studying the intersections between music and dance. This is true despite his overrepresentation in dance scholarship in large part because of the sustained popularity of the Alvin Ailey American…

Duke Ellington was already an international celebrity recognized for his seventeen-piece “Famous Orchestra” and their decade-long string of three-minute radio hits when he arrived at Los Angeles’s Union Station from New York in January of 1941. New York’s Harlem had been a seemi…

The luster of twentieth-century America was seductive. The age of modernity was ushered in by the automobile, motion picture, radio, and transatlantic flight. The mores of the Victorian era were crushed by a Prohibition-induced defiance. The 19th amendment to the Constitution of…