Duke Ellington - Ellington At Newport 1956

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Music reviews of Ellington At Newport 1956

Music Review: A classic and a conundrum
Rating: 4 Stars

First, the rights. The original release of the Gonsalves solo was badly flawed because it was played off-mike. Or so it was thought: in fact it turned out that Gonsalves had simply picked the wrong mike, which was hooked up to the Voice of America broadcast of the concert rather than the Columbia engineers' equipment. The VOA tapes were recovered, & engineer Phil Schaap has created a highly acceptable stereo mix by running the VOA recording in one channel, the Columbia recording in the other.

Columbia tried to get the Ellington band to secretly rerecord the entire disc in the studio. They did so, & the majority of the original LP was a studio recreation, with canned applause. Ellington angrily balked at forcing Gonsalves to recreate his original solo, however, & so the version of "Diminuendo and Crescendo" on the LP was indeed the flawed live version. (In addition, the LP included the live version of "Jeep's Blues", & spliced in Ray Nance's live solo on the "Festival Suite" to the studio rerecording. The rest of the LP was the studio recording, including faked emcee banter & announcements.)

So, this is an invaluable, almost miraculous restoration of the original 1956 Newport set; as an appendix, the studio session is included at the end. Yet my verdict would be mixed on whether the new version "improves" the old album. The verdict would be a resounding "Yes!" for the centrepiece of the album: "Diminuendo...". But what about the rest?

Well, the album starts bathetically enough. Four members of the band went AWOL before the planned start time for the set, & Ellington took the stage, played "The Star-Spangled Banner", "Black & Tan Fantasy" & "Tea of Two" with the partial band before giving up & aborting the set. Once the truant members had arrived, they returned to the attack with "Take the 'A' Train", before moving immediately to "Festival Suite". This was new music, written with Ellington's usual haste & clearly underrehearsed: the live performance is acceptable but has a lot of flubs, & in general the later studio version of these tracks is my preference. The rest of the concert is rather a ragbag--a nice "Sophisticated Lady", a rather annoying vocal number, "Day In Day Out", a couple numbers for Hodges ("I Got It Bad..." features a rare goof from him on the opening phrase--they thus rerecorded this piece in the studio too, though it wasn't on the original 1956 LP), the throwaway novelty number "Tulip or Turnip", a drum feature for Sam Woodyard called "Skin Deep", & the closing cooler "Mood Indigo". What the restoration of the concert largely reveals is that EXCEPT for "Diminuendo & Crescendo in Blue" this wasn't an especially remarkable concert. The flood of extra material, in other words, considerably dilutes the impact of the album. & also, the inclusion of every jot & tittle of the announcements & crowd noise & whatnot from the original concert further slackens the pace--do we really need _all_ of this? (By my count, there's about 12 minutes' worth of this "atmosphere" included among the live tracks.)

I feel rather guilty about giving this less than a 5-star rating, consideringly that this is an album with one of the greatest recorded solos in jazz. But I rather wish that Columbia had put out, in addition to this complete edition of the event & the studio sessions, a one-CD condensation that would appeal more to the casual listener. Sometimes less _is_ more.

Description of Ellington At Newport 1956

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