?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
JUMP FOR BACK PAY (MUSIC.) ELLINGTON, EDWARD KENNEDY "DUKE." Duke Ellington and members of the orchestra file claims against "Jump For Joy Inc." Pair of partially printed documents, accomplished by hand, on Los Angeles Local 767 Music Union forms. With an unsigned 8 x 10 photograph of the band in 1939. both signed by ellington and various members of his orchestra. Los Angeles, 1941
These claims are for unpaid salaries, for performances of Duke Ellington's Jump For Joy, that appeared at Los Angeles' Mayan Theatre in July of 1941. Both are signed by Ellington and a veritable "Who's Who" of jazz greats: Johnny Hodges, Harry Carney, Wallace Jones, Otto Hardwick, Juan Tijol, Laurence Brown, and Barney Bigard, on one claim; Rex Stewart, Ray Nance, Jimmie Blanton, Joseph Nanton, and Sunny Greer on the other. "The inspiration [for Jump for Joy] came from a late-night party, a convergence of Hollywood glamour and nascent civil-rights activism with one of America's greatest jazz orchestras. In the summer of 1941 Duke Ellington staged what he would later call the first social significance show. "Jump for Joy." Jump for Joy was an all-black musical revue that Ellington said 'would take Uncle Tom out of the theater and say things that would make the audience think.' It featured the Ellington Orchestra. . . and up-and-coming African-American performers such as the actress Dorothy Dandridge, the blues singer Big Joe Turner, and the comedian Wonderful Smith. The poet Langston Hughes contributed a sketch entitled 'Mad Scene from Woolworth's,' and Ellington's collaborator Billy Strayhorn took a significant hand in scoring. . . The show received mostly positive reviews, but the brash racial jubilation of songs such as "I've Got a Passport From Georgia" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin Is a Drive-In Now" provoked death threats, and one cast member was beaten as he left the theater. Although Ellington hoped to take the show to Broadway, its lack of stereotyping and its unabashed celebration of African-American pride made it an unlikely candidate for New York's Great White Way. After closing on September 29, 1941, it was revived for one week in November, and then again in Miami Beach in 1959 for an aborted two-week run" (David Brent Johnson, Night Lites, 2008).
