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To see the Ellington Orchestra live was a very moving and wholly theatrical experience, with each musician a player with his own script, and his own entrances and exits. Unless you were lucky enough to have seen Ellington in concert, and I was, all that remains are the recordings, with two that I believe give some idea of the man, and the musicians who played for him in the 1950s. At the start of that decade Duke Ellington, and his orchestra still topped the Metronome Jazz Poll; in fact they even topped the Popular Music Poll. But by 1956, with Elvis Presley taking the world by storm, Ellington's career seemed to be on the slide, that is until that year's Newport Jazz Festival, which by then was only a couple of years old but already seemed to be on its last legs, due to a lack of interest by the public, and the inability to attract what few jazz stars there were. Ellington agreed to be the major draw of 1956, writing a specially commissioned work, Festival Junction, which did get the interest of the declining jazz audience. And what that audience experienced on that rainy summers afternoon fifty years ago was both historical in how jazz, Ellington, and his sidemen, would be perceived thereafter.

All we have now of course is the remarkable recording of that festival. If any of you have the original LP of Ellington's contribution to the Newport Jazz Festival of 1956 - as I do - hang onto it because it's worth a small fortune. What it's not worth is listening to. So go and put the original LP in the bank and invest in the 2 CD set, Ellington (Complete). At Newport, that came out originally in 1999. The original live festival recording used just two microphones that allowed most of the solo work to be hidden behind the incredible decibel force of the orchestra, with later studio re-takes added as so called 'live' festival tracks. These two CDs put all of this to rights, and they include all of the material that was actually recorded on the day - all enhanced by the live Voice of America radio broadcast tapes that were discovered in the early1990s, which have been cleverly spliced into the new commercial recordings - plus the latter studio stuff (with the added, and fake, audience atmospherics taken out) put into the correct playing order of the day and listed clearly for what they are - studio takes. The whole thing gives a clear idea of how brilliant and evolutionary, not to say revolutionary, the Ellington Orchestra still was half a century ago.

But the most

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