Duke Ellington called the Sacred Concerts the most important thing he had ever done. Not the most technically accomplished. Not the most celebrated. The most important.

That judgment matters. Ellington had composed thousands of pieces over five decades. He had written extended suites for Carnegie Hall, scored Hollywood films, performed for kings and presidents, and won every honor the jazz world could offer. When he said the Sacred Concerts were the most important work of his life, he was comparing them to everything else — and choosing them.

The Commission and the Hesitation

The first Sacred Concert grew out of a commission from Rev. C. Julian Bartlett, dean of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, who invited Ellington to present an extended liturgical work as part of a yearlong festival marking the cathedral’s consecration. Ellington initially declined. According to John Edward Hasse, Ellington’s foremost biographer, this was not a question of musical ability. It was a question of weight. This was church — not a nightclub, not a concert hall — and Ellington took the distinction seriously.

When pressed by Bartlett and Bishop James A. Pike, Ellington entered what contemporaries described as a period of prayer and contemplation. When he agreed, he wrote in his 1973 autobiography Music Is My Mistress: “I recognized this as an exceptional opportunity. ‘Now I can say openly,’ I said, ‘what I have been saying to myself on my knees.’”

That sentence is the key to everything that followed.

The Faith Behind the Music

Ellington had grown up in Washington, D.C. in a devout household. His parents attended different churches — his mother Baptist, his father Methodist — and as a child he went to both, every Sunday. Regular churchgoing didn’t follow him into adult life, but the faith did. He was known to read the Bible nightly, and his music had always carried theological undertones: “Come Sunday,” from his 1943 suite Black, Brown and Beige, was an explicitly spiritual piece written twenty years before he ever set foot in Grace Cathedral.

What changed in 1965 was not the faith — that had been there the whole time. What changed was the frame. For the first time, Ellington was making music whose primary purpose was not artistic expression or entertainment, but worship.

The First Sacred Concert: Grace Cathedral, 1965

The premiere took place on September 16, 1965, at Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill in San Francisco. Ellington brought his full orchestra, the Grace Cathedral Choir, the Herman McCoy Choir, and vocal soloists including Esther Marrow, Jon Hendricks, and Jimmy McPhail. Tap dancer Bunny Briggs also performed.

The centerpiece was a new composition, “In the Beginning God” — a 20-minute orchestral work built around the opening four words of Genesis. Paul Gonsalves improvised over a gospel-styled background while the choir chanted the books of the Old Testament. Cat Anderson’s trumpet reached ascending pitch levels until Ellington, at the piano, quipped: “That’s as high as WE go.” Louis Bellson played a five-minute drum solo that stopped the room.

It was, by any measure, a spectacle. It was also, in 1965, near-scandalous.

The Controversy

According to Rebecca Nestle, Grace Cathedral’s cultural program manager, some clergy organizing other events in the same festival received death threats over the use of jazz in sacred space. A San Francisco Chronicle review the morning after Ellington’s concert noted that the audience appeared “discomfited, nervous or edgy, not completely willing to accept the idea” of jazz from an altar.

The idea that jazz — the music of the Cotton Club, of late nights and dance floors — belonged in a cathedral struck many as an affront. Ellington’s response, both in interviews and in the music itself, was that this was exactly backwards. He was not bringing a nightclub into a church. He was bringing his offering — the one thing he knew how to do — to the place where offerings were made.

“In the Beginning God” won the Grammy Award for Best Original Jazz Composition in 1967. The official album, A Concert of Sacred Music, was recorded at two concerts at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York on December 26, 1965 — where Lena Horne made a surprise appearance and 3,600 people filled the sanctuary — and released by RCA Victor in 1966.

The Second Sacred Concert: Saint John the Divine, 1968

The Second Sacred Concert premiered on January 19, 1968, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York — a 7,500-seat cathedral two subway stops from the original location of the Cotton Club in Harlem. The geographic irony was not lost on anyone.

This concert introduced Swedish singer Alice Babs, who became central to Ellington’s sacred music from this point forward. She sang “Heaven,” “Almighty God,” and the wordless vocal “T.G.T.T. (Too Good to Title).” Cootie Williams contributed a growl trumpet feature on “The Shepherd (Who Watches Over the Night Flock).”

The Second Sacred Concert is considered the most musically ambitious of the three — broader in its sources, more eclectic in its textures, and more fully developed as a standalone work. The studio recording was released on Prestige Records and has since been included in the 24-disc Duke Ellington Centennial Edition box set.

The Third Sacred Concert: Westminster Abbey, 1973

By the time Ellington composed the Third Sacred Concert, he was dying. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer and pneumonia in early 1973 and knew it. The concert premiered at Westminster Abbey in London on October 24, 1973 — seven months before his death on May 24, 1974.

Author Janna Tull Steed has written that the Third Sacred Concert is Ellington addressing God while facing his own mortality. The music is notably quieter than the first two — built around Alice Babs, Harry Carney’s baritone saxophone, and Ellington himself at the piano. The piece “Is God a Three Letter Word for Love?” was written for Babs. “The Brotherhood” was a tribute to the United Nations.

The AllMusic review by Richard S. Ginell described it as “burdened with a subdued solemnity and the sense that the ailing Ellington was now addressing God face to face.” That description is not a criticism. It is a description of what the music is.

The Third Sacred Concert was premiered at Westminster Abbey seven months before Ellington died. That is the biographical fact. The musical fact is that the Third Concert sounds like a man making a final accounting — not anxiously, but deliberately. Everything has been said that can be said. This is the last thing.

What the Sacred Concerts Were

Ellington described the Sacred Concerts on several occasions as not a jazz mass, but as his way of “bringing the Cotton Club Revue to the church.” That framing is typically Ellington — witty, modest on the surface, serious underneath.

The concerts drew heavily on earlier work: “Come Sunday” and “New World A-Comin’” from Black, Brown and Beige appear in the first concert; pieces from the stage show My People were incorporated. Ellington was not constructing sacred music from scratch. He was redirecting music that had always carried spiritual weight toward an explicitly spiritual purpose.

This is, finally, what makes the Sacred Concerts important beyond their biographical interest. They are not a departure from Ellington’s work. They are an arrival at what that work had been pointing toward. Alice Coltrane would reach a similar destination by a different route, as would John Coltrane with A Love Supreme — the idea that jazz, at its most serious, is not separate from spiritual practice but continuous with it.

Ellington performed variations of the Sacred Concerts hundreds of times in his final decade, in cathedrals and churches across the United States and Europe. He traveled, in his own words, “from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Cambridge, England.” The music followed him everywhere he went, and he offered it everywhere he went.

He died on May 24, 1974. The Sacred Concerts were premiered between 1965 and 1973. He spent the last eight years of his life making this offering.

He said it was the most important thing he had ever done. The music bears him out.

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