Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus & Max Roach - Money Jungle (1963)

A firey, tempestuous trio date organised at the suggestion of the great bandleader who wanted to record a piano trio album.  The musicians booked to back up the 63-year old in September 1962 were two decades his juniors, drummer Max Roach and bassist Charles Mingus.  From the opening title track, this was a session that cooked hard, with Mingus sounding like he's about to tear his strings off.  The almost-stern sounding, staccato take on Caravan was my introduction to the classic tune, back when it appeared on a popular Blue Note best-of CD in the 90s.

The famously short-fused bassist actually walked out on the sessions at one point before being coaxed back by Ellington, and much has been written about how the tension in the studio audibly contributed to such exciting uptempo tracks.  There is light and shade on the album too though, especially on the gorgeous Warm Valley.  Originally issued as an eight-track LP, Money Jungle was expanded to ten in the 80s, with this CD reissue following the original order then putting all the extra material afterwards - all of it absolutely essential listening.

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pw: sgtg

Duke Ellington - Ellington Uptown (1952)

A stone-cold classic from the dawn of the LP era, and my personal Ellington of choice.  Ellington Uptown, and its almost-as-awesome predecessor Masterpieces By Ellington, were released in the early 50s as featuring, for the first time, "full-length concert arrangements".  And boy did The Duke  and His Orchestra know how to get the most out of the new format, recording albums like this that still burst out of speakers sounding fresh and vital today.

There's reinventions of (even then) old classics from the Ellington playbook like The Mooche, Perdido and Take The A Train, with the latter now featuring a great Betty Roche vocal, and freshly-minted material too in the stunning curtain-raiser.  Skin Deep had been penned by drum prodigy Louie Bellson, whose double-bass-drum attack punctuates the track with solos that could give your average death metal drummer a run for their money in an era before most of them were even born.

The three suites that comprise the remaining material on the album, as far as I'm concerned, makes Ellington worthy to be spoken of in the same breath as Gershwin in terms of writing and arrangement.  The Harlem Suite was commissioned by Arturo Toscanini, and in Duke's words depicted a Sunday morning walk through Harlem's Latin and West Indian neighbourhoods up to the business district, with the sights and sounds of civil rights marchers along the way.

The two suites at the end of this CD only appeared as part of the original album on certain releases, so this 2004 reissue was really the first 'complete' Uptown.  The Controversial Suite takes a sideways look at rival factions in jazz - traditional vs. modern - by making both sound equally out-there.  Lastly, the Liberian Suite is the oldest recording here (1947) with its gorgeous vocal introduction 'I Like The Sunrise', and was a tribute to the first African-American settlers in the Liberian Republic a century beforehand.

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