Duke Ellington - Live At Newport 1958 (1994)

Duke and his orchestra arrived to play at the Newport Jazz Festival at a time when jazz festivals were a fairly new innovation. Ellington's band was the first and last group to play at the Newport Festival. The August 20, 1956 cover of Time featured Ellington. Columbia Records recorded the concert and an album soon followed. Duke appeared soon after on the cover of Time, and his resurgent popularity lasted throughout the rest of his life. Some of his best albums occurred during the next decade and a half, until age and illness began to claim some of Duke's band members and, in 1974, Ellington himself. Newport 1958 is a 1958 album by Duke Ellington, recorded at the Newport Jazz Festival of that year and later in the Columbia recording studio. The original album, Newport 1958 and the French Columbia CD #COL 468436 2 are mostly studio re-recordings of numbers performed at Newport. There is also dubbed in applause and crowd noise from Newport. During this time, Duke was frequently re-recording pieces that were performed live in the studio to be included on "live" albums. This was because he felt the live performances were not up to his standards. Only the tracks, "Just Scratchin' the Surface" and "Prima Bara Dubla" are from Newport on the original album. The double CD is all the music performed at Newport on July 3, 1958. The third CD was issued by Mosaic Records and contains all of the original album, minus the dubbed in crowd noise and applause. It also contains select live tracks from Newport to fill out the CD.