About

“The Duke Ellington album was recorded in 1962 and was not an Alan Bates project, but a tape he purchased for reissue on Black Lion. The session was recorded at Bell Recording Studio A in New York, a spacious 30' by 60' room with ceilings of over 20' -- one of the best live rooms in New York in the early 1960s. At that time, Ellington was regularly recording for Columbia Records, and the label had New York’s best recording studio, the famous Studio C. So record collectors have a wealth of well-recorded Ellington to choose from. With The Feeling of Jazz, we get Ellington playing tunes he had recorded many times over. The versions performed here are certainly different in many ways from other available versions, but I would be hard-pressed to state a preference for the Black Lion interpretations over others on Columbia. That’s not to say that these are not excellent performances or that they aren’t very well recorded; they are classic 1960s Ellington with top-notch sound.” – The Audio Beat