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鈥淲e would now like to take you on a tour of this place called Harlem,鈥� announced the composer on 21 January 1951. 鈥淚t is Sunday morning. You may hear a parade go by, or a funeral, or you may recognise the passage of those who are making Civil Rights demands.鈥�

The venue was the Metropolitan Opera House in New York 鈥� but there was no opera that night. This was a benefit concert for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a pioneering American civil rights movement formed at the beginning of the 20th century. On the programme was a new piece by the greatest band leader in the country, Edward Kennedy Ellington: meticulous, elegant and sophisticated enough to have earned himself, at an early age, the nickname "Duke".

Duke Ellington moved from Washington DC to New York City in the 1920s. His journey was part of a mass movement that had started in the ragtime era and became known as the Great Migration. The Manhattan neighbourhood of Harlem became a cultural and intellectual hotspot for writers, actors, visual artists and musicians. There were jazz clubs at the Savoy, the Apollo and above all at 644 Lexington on the corner of West 142nd Street: The Cotton Club, owned by the mob and decorated with images of southern plantations.

The musical talent that came out of Harlem was explosive. Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith, Fats Waller, Ma Rainey 鈥� and of course Duke Ellington, whose band became famous across America, thanks to weekly broadcasts on the radio station WHN. Ellington thought of his music as beyond category: rather than 鈥渏azz鈥� he preferred the more general term American Music, and from the 1920s he experimented with what he called 鈥渓arger forms鈥� 鈥� he was damned if his creative imagination was going to be blinkered by some three-minute commercial limit. In fact, he lost his contract with Decca in 1931 because he insisted on a commercially disastrous two-sided piece called Creole Rhapsody. But he persevered: Reminiscing in Tempo, Black Brown and Beige and The Liberian Suite are all hugely ambitious in scope and design.

So when the conductor Arturo Toscanini decided to commission a suite of music inspired by New York City, Ellington was the obvious choice. The result was a piece called Harlem, a dizzying ride of a piece: cinematic, high drama, a tone poem that swaggers and swoons and jostles like an uptown crossroads on a sweltering New York summer night. The opening trumpet introduces the neighbourhood by name 鈥� that seductive sighing interval singing it clearly. There鈥檚 hardly any improvisation in this piece and no role for piano. Ellington was a great pianist, but his greatest instrument of all was his band, and in Harlem he planted that band right at the heart of a symphony orchestra.

Hearing it that night at the Metropolitan Opera 鈥� at the benefit concert for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 鈥� the symbolism can鈥檛 have been too hard to decipher.

This is one of 100 significant musical moments explored by 麻豆社 Radio 3鈥檚 Essential Classics as part of Our Classical Century, a 麻豆社 season celebrating a momentous 100 years in music from 1918 to 2018. Visit bbc.co.uk/ourclassicalcentury to watch and listen to all programmes in the season.

This is an excerpt from a recording by the CBSO with conductor Simon Rattle.

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