“A Triangle” features the vocals by Holiday and solos by jazz clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Barney Bigard and Ellington Orchestra regular, trombonist 'Tricky Sam' Nanton.

The piece has been largely overshadowed by its successor, perhaps Ellington’s most best known extended composition, Black, Brown, and Beige and thus significantly less documentation exists concerning it.

Despite that, on October 19, 1935, The Chicago Defender published an article titled "Spotlites of Harlem", that announced the release of Symphony in Black among other current musical events of interest to readers.

"[3] The other conductor of the Orchestra, Maurice Peress was especially interested in reviving Ellington’s rarer works, a description which certainly includes Symphony in Black/"A Rhapsody of Negro Life".

"[3] In The Musical Quarterly, John Howland wrote an article titled "The Blues Get Glorified: Harlem Entertainment, Negro Nuances, and Black Symphonic Jazz".

The identification of popular-idiom concert works and concert-style popular song arrangements is central to understanding the mixed cultural aesthetics and formal design of a work like Symphony in Black, which owes very little to the performance traditions, formal expectations, and generic conventions of Euro-American classical music.”[4] Instead, Howland suggests that "Symphony in Black actually represents the upward-leaning—or rather 'glorified'—extension of a family of production-number-arranging conventions that were widely shared across dance bands, big band jazz, and the orchestral idioms of Hollywood and Broadway musicals, interwar radio, and the deluxe movie palace prologues of the day.