Ellington at Newport

Recording history and tape provenance

By 1956 Ellington's orchestra had spent nearly a decade in commercial decline. Big bands were expensive to keep on the road, and Ellington had been subsidising his musicians' salaries from his own songwriting royalties.

The Newport date was not expected to change that. The band's early set went poorly, a sluggish account of a new "Newport Jazz Festival Suite" written for the occasion. Festival organisers had pulled several members offstage beforehand and they had to be retrieved.

Then, well past midnight, the band closed with a 1937 piece, "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue." An open-ended solo feature for tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves bridged its two halves.

Gonsalves played 27 continuous choruses, driven by Jimmy Woode's bass and Sam Woodyard's drums, with Ellington pounding out chords and shouting encouragement. A platinum-blonde amateur dancer named Elaine Anderson, misidentified for decades as the anonymous woman in black, began dancing in the aisle near the stage.

Much of the crowd of roughly 7,000 followed her, and festival officials struggled to end the show as the audience refused to leave.

The orchestra that night included Paul Gonsalves and Jimmy Hamilton on tenor and clarinet, Johnny Hodges on alto and Harry Carney on baritone. Ray Nance, Willie Cook, Clark Terry and Cat Anderson played trumpets, with Britt Woodman and Quentin Jackson on trombones and Ellington at the piano.

What the record actually is

The stage microphones arranged for Columbia's rig missed much of Gonsalves's solo. Separate microphones set up for Willis Conover's Voice of America broadcast captured it properly, but Columbia had no access to that feed.

Avakian reviewed the tapes and judged the crucial performance unusable. Rather than lose it, Ellington and the band went into the studio the day after the festival. They re-recorded large portions of the material, including a full re-creation of the Gonsalves solo.

Avakian blended that with usable live material and added dubbed crowd noise to disguise the seams. Around 40 percent of what listeners heard on the original release was recorded live at Newport. The rest is a studio reconstruction presented as a concert document.

This was not public until 1996. A tape then surfaced in the Voice of America's broadcast archive holding the true unedited performance, with Gonsalves's actual solo.

Producer Phil Schaap used that tape alongside Columbia's original live reels to assemble an accurate account of the concert. It came out in 1999 as the double CD Ellington at Newport 1956 (Complete), in a mix of mono and stereo.

Every vinyl pressing of the original album carries the reconstruction. That is a property of the record rather than a fault in any pressing.

Original Columbia pressings (1956)

CL 934 is mono only, on Columbia's red and black six-eye label.

This sold in very large quantities as Ellington's career-reviving hit and was repressed steadily through the following decade. Clean originals are more attainable than most mid-1950s Columbia jazz titles.

A later stereo pressing exists as CS 8648 from 1963. The source is a 1956 mono production, so any stereo on that number is a rechannelling rather than a discrete stereo recording. No sound comparison against the mono original has been published.

Mobile Fidelity (MOFI 1-035)

The Mobile Fidelity edition is a numbered mono LP in the Silver Label Series. Krieg Wunderlich mastered it from the original master tapes, assisted by Rob LoVerde, and it was pressed at RTI.

Reception is generally strong. Several owners describe the pressing as remarkably quiet and the crowd's reaction as viscerally present.

A meaningful minority of collectors who own both an original and this pressing still prefer the original. The reason they give is how Ellington's spoken introductions come through. They describe the Mobile Fidelity as flatter on his voice.

The 2013 "complete concert" reissue

A vinyl reissue, catalogue DOX904, advertises the complete Newport concert on vinyl for the first time, drawing on the material assembled for the 1999 CD.

It belongs to the wave of European small-label reissues of recent years, likely sourced digitally rather than from analog tape. Its licensing status is not clearly documented. Such releases are commonly sold through major retailers under a legal framework that differs from US copyright law.

It is the only way to get the fuller, more accurate performance on vinyl. Sonic expectations should be modest.

Japanese pressings

CBS/Sony issued this title in Japan more than once. There is a 1971 promotional pressing and a later standard release around 1975, catalogue SOPN-150, both with Japanese liner notes.

SOPN-150 carries a shorter selection than the US LP. It holds the Newport Jazz Festival Suite excerpts, "Jeep's Blues" and "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" rather than the full programme. Confirming the tracklist matters if completeness does.

Neither Japanese pressing has a published sound comparison against the US pressings.

Pressings to avoid

No bootleg or notably compromised pressing of this title is widely documented.

Buyer's guide by budget

$: The DOX904 reissue, for the expanded and more accurate concert rather than the original's reconstruction, likely digitally sourced.

$$: The Mobile Fidelity MOFI 1-035, for a quiet modern pressing.

$$$: A clean original six-eye mono CL 934, attainable given how many were pressed.

Pressing tier summary

References

• Discogs (master, all versions): https://www.discogs.com/master/136190-Duke-Ellington-And-His-Orchestra-Ellington-At-Newport

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