Customer Reviews

Duke at the Cotton Club

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Be careful of this one. The titles given correspond exactly, in order, to a collection put out some years ago (copyrighted in 1958 and 1985) by RCA Victor (now BMG) as an "RCA Special Product". It was titled "At the Cotton Club". These were studio recordings. I checked W. E. Timner's "Ellingtonia", a discography published by Scarecrow which was exhaustive at the time of publishing in 1988. There was no live performance corresponding to this set. "Jungle Nights in Harlem", for example, was limited to a single studio recording on June 4th, 1930.
These titles are all excellent Ellington compositions representative of his "jungle music" phase. It's the designation as "live" that I'm skeptical of.
Keep in mind that some recordings from the Cotton Club are easily available, dating from the Cotton Club's second incarnation in midtown. These "airshots" or radio broadcasts, with no audience or a very small one, were made in 1938 with fairly good sound quality. Two packages on CD are titled "Cotton Club Anthology 1938" and "Cotton Club Nights".

This is a fine compilation of some excellent tunes that were recorded during the period when Ellington's orchestra was performing frequently at the Cotton Club in Harlem. However, the title is rather misleading, and Amazon's designation of this as a live album is even more so. These are NOT live recordings, but studio recordings.