Duke Ellington and His Orchestra - Ellington Indigos - 180g Vinyl LP

2012 reissue

Michael Fremer's 100 Recommended All-Analog LP Reissues Worth Owning - Rated 3/100!

Michael Fremer Rated 9/11 Music, 9/11 Sonics!

Heavy-Weight 180 Gram Audiophile All-Analog Pressing! Mastered by Kevin Gray & Pressed at RTI!

"Absolutely a sonic masterpiece... Hugely recommended, and one of the Best Ellington reissues to date!"

Impex Records makes your nights a little bit cooler with this Limited Edition, 180 Gram All-Analog shot of pure Duke at his most soulfully nocturnal. An elegant, romantic set of ballads from the master of American large-group jazz. Available for the first time on Pristine 180g Vinyl! Mastered by Kevin Gray and limited to only 2500 pressings! Ellington Indigos is a 1958 jazz album by Duke Ellington. Indigos features performances of jazz standards such as "Mood Indigo", "Autumn Leaves", "Prelude To a Kiss" and more!

"The legendary composer and bandleader Duke Ellington was so famous for his poise and charm that it should be no surprise that he had a pithy story at the ready whenever he was asked about one of his most famous and enduring works, "Mood Indigo." Of the song he and his orchestra recorded for the very first time on this day in 1930, Ellington was fond of saying, "Well, I wrote that in 15 minutes while I was waiting for my mother to finish cooking dinner." As neatly as that version fit with his well-tended reputation for effortless sophistication, the true account of the song's development reflects the gifts for collaboration and adaptation that were always critical elements of Ellington's genius."

"The genesis of "Mood Indigo" was a visit to New York City in 1930 by a New Orleans jazzman named Lorenzo Tio, Jr. Duke Ellington's clarinetist, Barney Bigard, was a former student of Tio's, and on Tio's visit to New York, he shared with Bigard a number of melodies he'd written, including one called "Dreamy Blues" that had served as the theme song for his group back home, Armand Piron's New Orleans Orchestra. "I asked him if I could borrow it," Bigard later wrote in his autobiography. "I took it home and kept fooling around with it...and got something together that mostly was my own but partly Tio's." Bigard's variation on "Dreamy Blues" would soon become the clarinet solo on "Mood Indigo," thanks to Duke Ellington's penchant for involving his band members in his composition process... With lyrics added by Mitchell Parish in 1931 (but credited to Ellington's manager Irving Mills), "Mood Indigo" became a vocal-jazz standard as well as an instrumental one, recorded memorably by Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Nina Simone among many others." - from This Day in History (October 15); www.history.com

"Just released, one of my favorite Duke Ellington LPs of all time, Ellington Indigos! Impex Records has re-mastered and pressed 2,500 Limited Edition stereo LPs from the masters at Sony/Columbia of this 1958 tour de force recording session. It was first released as Columbia CS 8053 in both stereo and mono, and was one of the first top jazz albums released in stereo at the time by Columbia. My friends, this Impex Records LP is absolutely a sonic masterpiece reissue of the first order!"