Customer Reviews

Live & Rare

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It's hard for me to work up much enthusiam for this 3 cd set. The first cd has excerpts from Ellington's two concerts in Eastbourne England on December 1, 1973. Except for a taping at the BBC a few days later, these were concerts were Ellington's last recorded concerts in Europe, and only a few months later he was dead. The band is still functioning, but it's just a shadow of the band it was even just a few years earlier. The Piano Player and Meditation, the two Ellington features are the highlights.

The second cd has The Duke at Tanglewood--Ellington's collaboration with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. This is the least successful of Ellington's crossover projects. Instead of performing the material that Ellington wrote with orchestration in mind, say, "Night Creature," we get some of Ellington's popular hits orchestrated for the Pops. Although Fiedler had great respect for Ellington, he found it very difficult to work with him. The producers have added promotional material to the orignial release. This interweaving doesn't add much to the material.

The third cd has the songs that Ellington recorded for Reader's Digest in 1969. "The whole set suggests the sound of the band at a sophisticated wedding party..." says the liner notes. That's not much of an endorsement. Of all of Ellington's recordings these interest me the least. Very few of these songs were ever performed by Ellington in public.

I love Ellington... and I have about 20 CDs of his music. This set is only one which is a disappointment.

Disk 1 is the best of the three, and features some interesting stuff.

Disk 2 has recorded comments by Ellington. These are a one-sided conversation: the idea is that a local DJ would ask a question, and then run the recording of Ellington answering, simulating a conversation which never actually took place. It's kinda creepy. The 'interviews' are interspersed with music. Ellington's band plays with the Boston Pops, and its by far the worst, most square music Ellington ever recorded.

Disc 3 is a bit better, semi-kitschy arrangements of non-Ellington tunes recorded for Reader's Digest. Some interesting stuff, but not as good as Ellington's original tunes.

I've been an avid Ellington afficionado for quite some time, and I must say this collection is the holy grail for any Ellington collector. Aside from the historical significance of these selections, the expert musicianship and previously unavailable bonus material, the remastering is impeccable. I don't believe that any available material by Ellington exists with the sonic excellence of many of these selections. For those who have never heard the Duke live in person, here is the closest you are going to get. For beginners, there are other compilations(eg Sony's centennial 3CD set) that offer a better intro, but for fans of any intensity and audiophiles this is a must own.

I was just looking this up on Amazon & noticed the other reviews. What no one seems to have mentioned is the main purpose of this release was to fill the few holes in his RCA owned masters that were left out of the 24 cd box The Centennial Edition: Complete RCA Victor Recordings.

This could have easily been a single disc or at most a 2 cd set, as Tanglewood & Eastbourne are on the 24 cd box & Mosaic has the Mary Lou Williams piano festival recordings available on a single cd called "The Jazz Piano", but again this set is aimed at DE completists who bought the 24 cd box & were not given quite his complete RCA catalog as promised (there was a bit of an uproar among DE collectors at the time regarding this issue). Though far from essential, The Reader's Digest sessions were especially hard to find before this release.

Nice mastering also.

The recordings found on Live and Rare are late Ellington. If you ever want to take over a small island or country, I suggest you listen to the Pops' version of Caravan found on disc two. Not only is it a major power trip, it also contains one of my favorite low end Ellington piano solos. While the interview sections are annoying when you want to hear music, they are insightful and-to anyone who just likes Ellington for being Ellington-fun listening. Disc one is a 1973 concert that also fairs well for selling the band's immortal status. As they aged, the grooves became much more airy and loose. This-in my opinion-is not a bad thing at all! They seem to just be strutting along to the final show and beyond. The reason that they could do that is because they held the title of forever cool without need to prove anything. Disc three is some pop tunes with Wild Bill Davis on organ and my favorite Ellington drummer, Rufus Jones, on drums. These are all fun songs and mostly upbeat. If you already have enough Ellington that you are thinking about purchasing this collection, I suggest it wholeheartedly. If you don't have Far East, New Orleans, or Newport (etc., etc.) then I suggest starting there!

I have a Chinese bootleg of this set, beautifully packaged, which set me back only about $5 in a CD shop in Vietnam. Alas, however, they reduced it to a two-CD set, elminating the first (and arguably most important) disc of material, the Eastbourne concert. Oh, well, the price was right. With that understood, I'll review discs two and three of this set. Disc Two reproduces the Duke at Tanglewood LP made with Arthur Fielder and the Boston Pops. This seems to be the Ellington album everyone loves to hate, so I was surprised how decent it was. The overall effect is not different from albums many jazz singers made in the 1950s and 60s with strings. The presence of big orchestras and string sections necessarily reduces the sense of swing, but Ellington's piano is strongly featured throughout this concert, and he never played anything that didn't swing. He's got his bassist (John Lamb) and drummer Louis Bellson, so it's frequently like an Ellington piano trio with orchestral accompaniment. Sure, it's a little kitschy, but it's entertaining. Maybe I'm cutting it some slack because, when I was a kid, my Aunt Wanda used to get season tickets to Pops concerts, so I remember seeing Arthur Fiedler perform several times. His orchestrations were always meant to be cheerful and accessible, not high art, and this approach to Ellington tunes generates something not all that far from Gershwin's more readily accepted classical stuff. It's a reminder of what a great composer Ellington was, because his music translates so well into all these different kinds of settings. Interspersed are some fairly extensive interview tracks with Ellington that are charming and interesting, so I actually think this dics warrants repeated listenings. As for Disc Three, it's all 60s pop tunes performed by the Ellington band, and they bring their inimitable sound and texture to some pretty silly material. It could have been awful, but these guys are professionals: they used to play this kind of pop dreck in the 1930s, after all, alongside Ellington originals, so it's really not all that heretical for them to being covering pop tunes in the 1960s. It's not essential Ellingtonia, by any means, but it's a fine listen: muzak for people with taste.