Festival Session

At a time when sustaining as large a band as Ellington s orchestra was beginning to prove difficult, Duke participated in the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. The Ellington performance is best remembered for Paul Gonsalves multiple choruses on Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue , which brought the audience s excitement level to its zenith and led to a resurgence in Duke s popularity. He used to say in later years that he had been born at Newport 56. From that point on he was a regular attraction at the festival (as well as many other similar festivals that began to appear later). Ellington tended to introduce new pieces at these events, and the album Festival Session 59 was a studio recording that primarily featured tunes he had presented at the Newport and Playboy jazz festivals during that year. Not all of them were new pieces. Perdido , originally composed by Ellington s trombonist Juan Tizol, was already an old standard by this time. Duke s first recording of his son Mercer s composition Things Ain t What They Used to Be also took place in 1941. Copout had been recorded in 1957, so Ellington s reworking on the same tune led to the title Copout Extension . However, every time Duke reworked one of his old tunes (as proven on the marvelous Masterpieces by Ellington LP), something new happened. Duel Fuel , Idiom 59 and Launching Pad were indeed new compositions, and the latter two, along with the extended version of Copout , were debuted in front of an audience at Newport on July 4, 1959. These long live versions of Copout Extension and Idiom 59 have been added at the end of our CD as bonus tracks.

1: Perdido
2: Copout Extension
3: Duel Fuel - Part I
4: Duel Fuel - Part II
5: Duel Fuel - Part III
6: Idiom '59 - Part I (Vapor)
7: Idiom '59 - Part II
8: Idiom '59 - Part III
9: Things Ain't What They Used to Be
10: Launching Pad
11: V.I.P.'s Boogie
12: Jam With Sam
13: Idiom '59
14: Copout Extension

Number of Discs: 1

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