Duke Ellington - Ellington At Newport (1956)

For the most part I've stuck to the original album when doing these reviews. Rdio doesn't seem to have the original Ellington At Newport available so I'm just gonna go ahead and listen to the deluxe vers... 2 hours and 7 minutes? Holy balls... Good thing I have nothing better to do at work. Hopefully this means I will have plenty of things to say.

Duke Ellington was the leader of a big band back when those things were still super popular. By the time this album was recorded that style of music was waning in popularity. Using this album as an example it's really not hard to see why. Think of any 12-bar blues song you know. Play it with a swinging drum beat and a stand-up bass playing quarter notes. Then take your big band and have one player stand up and do a ten-minute solo while the rest do fuck all. That's most of this album. It's amazing for a "big band" how much time off most of the band gets while one member, a sax player or muted trumpet, gets an extended solo. It's also amazing the rhythm section can stay awake as long as they do playing dsssss-dt-dt-dsssss-dt-dt-dsssss and ba-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum for as long as they do.

Of course all the players featured within are motherfuckers. But I can only hear seven or eight songs end with a guy blasting out impossibly squeaky high notes on a trumpet before I get a bit tired of the display. I guess if you like big band music from the classic period this is exactly the album you should seek out. The sound is incredible and you get two concerts, including intros from people with really interesting temporal accents. People just don't sound like that anymore. For me though I can only give it 2 stars. There's just too much standard jazzy embellishment and not enough that makes me say, "Holy shit!"

Addendum: I recently saw the David O. Russel film American Hustle. It got a lot of buzz surrounding the 2014 Oscars, most of that highly unjustified. The movie is a clutter of unfocused ideas, but one thing that stuck out when I saw it was the two lead characters, played by Christian Bale and Amy Adams, bonding over their mutual love of Ellington At Newport. This is one of the laziest tricks in the movie romance book... Two characters like jazz music! They must have a deep spiritual connection! I just wanted to mention that.