For Duke

1938 was a very busy year for Duke Ellington in the recording studios, whether making classics with his big band or being the pianist and organizer of sessions allegedly led by his sidemen. This disc has plenty of big-band sides and combo dates led by clarinetist Barney Bigard, trumpeter Cootie Williams, and altoist Johnny Hodges. Most notable among the selections are "Stepping Into Swing Society," "Echoes of Harlem," "The Gal From Joe's," "I Let a Song Go out of My Heart," and "Jeep's Blues," but there are no throwaways among these three-minute gems.

The Essential George Duke is a double-disc, 31-track set documenting George Duke's years with Epic between 1977 and 1984 that netted an astonishing 11 albums, and the third Stanley Clarke/Duke project disc recorded in 1990. These were the years that Duke – never a jazz purist anyway – decided to take a tough swing at the R&B charts. He succeeded.

George Duke was an American musician, known as a keyboard pioneer, composer, singer and producer in both jazz and popular mainstream musical genres. He worked with numerous artists as arranger, music director, writer and co-writer, record producer and as a professor of music. He first made a name for himself with the album The Jean-Luc Ponty Experience with the George Duke Trio. He was known primarily for thirty-odd solo albums, of which 'A Brazilian Love Affair' from 1980 was his most popular, as well as for his collaborations with other musicians, particularly Frank Zappa.

This collection of Ellington's Thirties recordings is generous in that it offers 95 selections and meagre in that there is no discographical information at all (no recording dates, no personel, no matrix numbers). The liner notes give some information but leave one pining for more too. There the criticism ends. Audio restoration by Dutchman Harry Coster (who is attached to the Dutch Jazz Archive and has an outstanding reputation for painstaking restoration of old material) is beyond reproach and the recordings never sounded so good before. And of course there is the music itself, which is formidable, both in musical content and in execution by that peerless group of proud individuals that constituted the Duke Ellington orchestra…

Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American composer, pianist, and leader of a jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life…

Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were (and are) two of the main stems of jazz. Any way you look at it, just about everything that's ever happened in this music leads directly – or indirectly – back to them. Both men were born on the cusp of the 19th and 20th centuries, and each became established as a leader during the middle '20s. …