#769 Duke Ellington & His Orchestra - Ellington at Newport (Original Release*)

Here's an album where context is everything. Depending on how much you know, you might have one of three reactions to this album:

1) just listening to what's on the disc: this is a perfectly good, brash, big-band, blues-based jazz album, with some pretty epic solos. It sure is hard to hear that sax player on that last song though.

2) knowing about the context of this particular show (specifically knowing that it was a legendary performance and single-handedly responsible for revitalizing Ellington's career, that the crowd nearly rioted when the show ended, obligating the band to keep playing and playing and playing, and that that last solo is particularly legendary): yeah, ok, I can see that. That really is quite a solo at the end though, love all those encouragements and energy from the backing band. Still wish you could hear it better.

3) knowing the full history of this actual recording, that according to some accounts 40% was recreated in the studio afterwards, and that crowd noise was added afterwards to cover some places where the sax player missed the mic*: well. that kind of takes the fun out of it.

Let's keep these list rolling! There's a few ways to appreciate a live album:

1) as the way to just get a good song, one not available in studio. The Earphoria / Vieuphoria recording of Silverfuck, with its huge Jackboot coda (9:00) is a great example.

2) as a way to feel the raw energy that comes from live performance. This is most of the appeal of James Brown's legendary Apollo recording.

3) as a way to simulate the experience of being at the actual concert, feeling the feelings of the moment via recorded sound. I reckon this must be the appeal behind all those Grateful Dead recordings.

The first big problem with this album is that part of its appeal is the context. The performance was so important, so revolutionary, transcending the actual music, and we're supposed to listen to this as a record of that moment. But with so much fakery going on behind the scenes providing an unrealistic crowd sound and changes from the actual in-the-moment performances, this fails criteria #3. This isn't a recording of the time, its a strange recreation, pure sonic diorama.

The second problem is that, absent that legendary context, this is a good-but-not-great performance. The exception is that one epic solo on the last track, but...that's where the recording quality falls apart, and you find yourself straining to hear, mentally reconstructing the solo that's back there, trying to gin up a concept of what it must have sounded like in the flesh, and coming up short.

This album's a failure. A more-cleaned-up version, or a pure version, both would have been better. As it is, its a middle ground that you have to struggle to pull out of its own mistakes. Hardly the mark of a legendary album, the legendary underlying performance notwithstanding 2.5/5

* I'm reviewing the original recording, not the 1999 CD reissue re-created from later-found tapes, though I will concede that, based on a quick listen, the latter has a much, much better sound on this solo I'm so harping on.